Rupert Cornwell: Out of America

How, one wonders, when the US government has been revealed as a hollow sham, did we get it - or, more exactly, him - so wrong? I refer to Dick Cheney, Vice-President by rank, yet in effect chief executive of America Inc.

This has been a wretched week for Cheney, though you wouldn't guess it from the unflappable demeanour of the man, or from that inscrutable half-smile playing on his face, with its unmistakable message of "I know something that you don't". Over four days The Washington Post ran a series of articles setting out in quite breathtaking detail Cheney's unseen yet unshakeable grasp on the levers of power in Washington. Separately he received a congressional subpoena and was ridiculed for his attempts to pretend he was not even part of the federal government.

Yet the question gnaws. Why did no one warn about this when his nominal boss, George W Bush, entered the White House six and a half long years ago? Whatever their view of Bush, back in summer 2000 people tended to welcome his choice of Cheney for Vice-President. The future boss might be callow and ignorant of the world, but Cheney seemed a thoroughly known quantity. After all, he'd been around for ever, chief-of-staff to President Ford in the 1970s, Congressman and then Secretary of Defense in the Eighties and Nineties. In the first Gulf War he had been the safest of pairs of hands, before moving to the private sector as boss of the energy services group Halliburton.

He would bring with him huge experience yet - rare in a sitting Vice-President - no ambition for the top job. Cheney, we imagined, would be Merlin to the raw and untested King Arthur, dispensing wise and frank advice, an elder statesman with nothing left to prove. Yes, he was a conservative. But the record suggested he was a reasonable man, a conservative with a small "c" who didn't raise his voice or wear his ideology on his sleeve. You might disagree with him. By and large, however, you respected him.

But was there ever a greater collective misjudgement? What happened to turn this non-threatening figure into the most powerful Vice-President in the country's history, who rides roughshod over the US Constitution and uses his proximity to the President to bypass the normal decision-making process - so secretive that Richard Nixon seems the patron saint of open government by comparison? To be fair, even some in a position to know were fooled. Take Brent Scowcroft, National Security Adviser under the first President Bush, when Cheney ran the Pentagon. "I consider Cheney a good friend," Scowcroft told The New Yorker magazine in 2005. "I've known him for 30 years. But Dick Cheney I don't know any more." Scowcroft's belief is that 9/11 changed Cheney's world view, that the small-c conservative was transformed into a dark and scowling Hobbesian, now convinced that laws counted less than the principle of smiting your enemies before they smite you. Yet the "new" Cheney was in evidence even earlier.

Back in the spring of 2001, he chaired an energy policy task force that refused even to say who had testified to it. Environmental groups and some Congressmen objected so strenuously to the secrecy that the battle went to the courts. As would become usual, Cheney won.

Thus the stage was set. Over the past six years I've often run into old journalist friends who, like me, covered the Kremlin in its sealed Communist heyday. Invariably we were struck by the similarities between Moscow then and Washington now - how the adage about rule by general secretaries applied equally to life under George W Bush: you knew nothing, but understood everything. So it was here. Just as there were factions in the Politburo, there were factions in the Bush administration. We further knew that not only was the hardline faction led by Cheney but also, thanks to Cheney, it prevailed.

The comparison, of course, extends only so far. In Soviet Russia (and in Vladimir Putin's Russian Federation for that matter) the press could never have published such material as the Post's. But the Post's articles confirm my basic argument. Everything we suspected was going on - and then some.

The details are amazing. His offices apparently contain "man-sized" safes in which even humdrum documents are given the absurdly high classification of "sensitive compartmented information" normally reserved for major government secrets. On Cheney's orders, standard Secret Service logs of visitors to his office have been destroyed. The VP and his men, it seems, write policy directives that his insouciant master signs with barely a glance. He has outmanoeuvred cabinet officials who crossed him, whether on Iraq, tax policy or the threat to trout and salmon species in western rivers.

Someone once said that satire died the day Henry Kissinger was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. Happily, satire survived that setback. But it risks a new death with revelation of the Cheney capers.

Or take another incident that emerged last week. A pesky little government oversight agency wanted Cheney to co-operate in classifying official executive branch documents, as routinely does the White House and other parts of the federal government. Cheney's office first refused - and then tried to have the agency abolished when it challenged his behaviour. When that wheeze failed, his advisers tried another, claiming that because the Vice-President was ex-officio president of the Senate, he was actually part of the legislative branch of the Constitution, and thus exempt from the regulations in the first place. This from a man who regularly invokes the very doctrine of executive privilege invoked by Nixon in his vain bid to prevent publication of the Oval Office Watergate tapes.

Not surprisingly, the late-night comedy shows had a field day. Only when the House of Representatives threatened to take Cheney at his word, and cut off $5m of funding for the Vice-President as an executive branch official, did he relent.

So the truth about the recent governance of America has emerged, of a President careless of detail despite his touted MBA degree, who has outsourced much of the decision making to a Vice-President who operates like a stealth version of a British prime minister, with total mastery of the bureaucratic process and no hindrance from the man who, nominally, is his boss.

Paul O'Neill, Bush's first Treasury Secretary, who was sacked midway through the President's first term after clashing with Cheney, called the latter "the puppeteer". The neo-conservatives who have propelled Bush foreign policy might feel the same. Cheney was never one of them. Yet he used their naive, idealistic belief in bringing democracy to the Middle East as a veil for his own darker designs for Iraq.

Lately a handful of left-wing congressional Democrats, led by the eternal presidential hopeful Dennis Kucinich, have sponsored a resolution seeking Cheney's impeachment. But his surreptitious power explains the greater mystery of why President Bush has faced no serious impeachment threat himself. The answer is three words: President Dick Cheney. Assuming, of course, he isn't that already.

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