In 2006, at the height of the sectarian conflict which had arisen due to the US-led invasion of Iraq, Jon Stewart, an American comedian, leaned across his desk and, in mock confidentiality, asked his guest, Senator John McCain, "Is Dick Cheney crazy?"
Cheney had made one of his more fantastic pronouncements, "the insurgency is in its last gasps", which followed some of the more outrageous of his claims - "there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein has weapons of mass destruction" and "we know that Saddam's intelligence people met with Mohammed Atta [one of the plane bombers] in Prague to help plan 9/11" and "when we invade Iraq we'll be welcomed as liberators".
Cheney has now begun channelling the ghost of Winston Churchill. Writing in the June 23 Wall Street Journal, Cheney says of Obama's policies in Iraq, Syria and the Middle East, "Rarely has a US president been so wrong about so much at the expense of so many".
Yes. That's true if you don't count the failures of George W. Bush and those of his chief enabler, Richard Bruce "Dick" Cheney. Cheney's borrowing of Churchillian cadences ends their resemblance. Churchill, for all his flaws, did succeed in helping to win his last war. And after a long career when he was known for his bellicose preferences, Churchill at last declared, "Jaw, jaw, is always better than war, war". Not so Dick Cheney. He would like to see the US resume its military engagement with the Arab countries. Like the other neo-cons who promoted the Iraq disaster as something easy, quick and able to be done on the cheap - "Iraqi oil will pay for it" - Cheney's over-the-top criticisms of Obama's policies represent an unprecedented political attack by a former administration on a succeeding one. The custom had been for former presidents and vice-presidents to retire to oblivion, write memoirs and garner funds to build themselves a library and otherwise remain silent as George W. Bush has done.
What can Cheney's motives be in speaking out? Prior to his WSJ op-ed, Cheney had been involved in his daughter Liz's failed campaign to take the place in the US Senate of an old family friend, Mike Enzi of Wyoming. In the process, Liz Cheney tried to overcome charges of being insufficiently conservative by throwing her lesbian sister, Mary, under a bus, in attacking gay marriage. Dick Cheney, campaigning for Liz, was forced to choose between his daughters, thus creating a very public rupture in the politically required picture of happy family life.
