Dick Cheney Is Dead
NOV 04, 2025
War and rumors of war dominate the headlines. Venezuela. Nigeria. Iran. Somalia. A “new Cold War” involving Russia and China. What are we to believe?
The events of the 62 years of my short life (Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, peace dividends that never arrive, military budgets that keep soaring, U.S. domination of the world’s weapons trade, the National Security State as America’s fourth and arguably most powerful branch of government, and on and on) make me highly suspect of official narratives about any war, especially as those same Pentagon budgets soar and those same arms exports keep flooding the world in the (false) name of democracy.
Nevertheless, warmongers in our country continue to shout and bray for more war. Those who make the most noise are typically the furthest from the fighting. Typically, the closer you are to the fighting, the more you want it to stop. Especially if you’re doing the fighting. Consider Erich Maria Remarque’s “All Quiet on the Western Front.” When the main character, Paul, a frontline grunt, goes home on leave, he realizes the blood-thirstiness of the REMFs is far different from the war he’s seeing at the front. (REMF, rear-echelon mother-fucker, is a colorful and meaningful military acronym.)
Often those who talk about war use the most bloodless expressions. So, for example, I’ve read that Ukrainians must “prosecute their war of defense,” helped by generous supplies of American-made weaponry. When I think of war, I think of the concrete. Blasted bodies, a poisoned environment, disease, dead animals, PTSD and TBI, moral injury, atrocities and war crimes (because wars always produce atrocity), and so on. Phrases like “help Ukraine prosecute their war of defense” strike me as Orwellian in the sense of his classic essay on politics and the English language. It sounds good and noble, but how ready are those who support Ukraine to join the cause in the trenches?
An American president now speaks of “the enemy within” and city streets as a training ground for U.S. military action. When everything is war, nothing is safe as the worst crimes and atrocities become possible.
Postscript: As I was writing this, I learned that Dick Cheney has died at the age of 84. NBC News described him as the “Iraq war architect,” as if he was a highly skilled and creative builder instead of a war criminal. A reader sent along a BBC headline that suggests there was “faulty” intelligence leading up to the Iraq war in 2003, as if Cheney had no hand in manufacturing a malicious and mendacious narrative of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.
Even warmongers like Cheney, proud of their mailed fists, get treated and fitted with kid gloves by a fawning media. Of course, Cheney, when he had an opportunity to serve in Vietnam, famously said he had other priorities.
Maybe the American people, collectively, need to say we have other priorities than waging war around the globe.
Bracing Views 
… Cheney’s gone, and like so many other war criminals, never got the punishments he justly deserved for the rivers of blood he so eagerly created-sanctioned
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It is interesting that drone operators who sit at a console and kill people have a high incidence of PTSD though they are never on the ground at the site of the killing. I think of the drone operator as a person using a tool to kill in the form of an obedient robot in the sky.
Dick Cheney used people, our soldiers, as his tool to kill in Iraq. Like a drone operator he was never at the site of the killing but unlike the drone operator he never had to witness the killings though he was just as instrumental as the drone operator, though orders of magnitude more deadly. Should any one of such people as Cheney be strapped into a chair and forced to watch each and every death for which they are responsible, surely madness would result in no more than a day or two at most. This high and mighty person would quickly order the killings to stop that not long before had been ordered so easily. Cheney was like all powerful people, free and eager to act but immune from consequences.
These “leaders” such as any number of our presidents, secretaries of “defense” and now a VP, grow old and appear to have not a bit of remorse, far less PTSD, for what they have done. GWB is doing fine. Anyone praising Cheney, such as Nancy Pelosi, is just another member of the powerful removed from what they do.
I can’t conclude without mentioning an exception, Robert McNamara, who was haunted by and felt remorse for what he did to the Vietnamese. He had that rare possession of the powerful, a conscience.
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“These ‘leaders’ such as any number of our presidents, secretaries of ‘defense’ and now a VP, grow old and appear to have not a bit of remorse, far less PTSD, for what they have done. GWB is doing fine. Anyone praising Cheney, such as Nancy Pelosi, is just another member of the powerful removed from what they do.”
The lack of remorse goes beyond those they directly and more or less immediately kill in (lopsided) war, it’s also those who are made to suffer yet are still alive. The SNAP beneficiaries being one example. Medicaid cuts. Students whose learning suffers in underfunded school districts. In short, the diminished life prospects of the have-nots. The Dumbyas, the Cheneys, the Rumsfelds, the Wolfowitzes, the whole Iraq invasion cabal, and their apologists and accommodationists, they simply don’t care, other people’s lives mean nothing, less than nothing to them.
Let them be damned.
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“Maybe the American people, collectively, need to say we have other priorities than waging war around the globe.”
Hmmm, I thought we already said it, 250 or so years ago, rather clearly too, along the lines of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” and “to provide for the general welfare.” Things have kinda gone off the rails, I’d say…
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