By John Catalinotto
November 7, 2025
We come to bury Cheney, not to praise him. This is unlike the comments in most of the corporate media, who always find something positive to say about the most despicable imperialist statespeople.
The comment that one adviser to former President George W. Bush came up with was that while most rivals in official Washington will stab you in the back, Dick Cheney would stab you in the chest. He meant it as a compliment.
In public office, Dick Cheney was a consistent warmonger. He led two major wars that destroyed Iraq. He supported every hike in the military budget and social services cutback and fought against abortion rights. He promoted a crackdown on dissent and defended the torture of war prisoners.
Since the first Trump term ended, Cheney attacked Donald Trump’s first regime and MAGA’s assault on Congress on Jan. 6, 2021. This won Cheney some praise among the imperialist media. It’s important to examine why.
There is no doubt that former Vice President Dick Cheney was the enemy of the working class and oppressed peoples, in the U.S. and the world. Even the obituaries in the establishment corporate media had to list some of Cheney’s nastiest deeds, although they called them “accomplishments.”
In brief, when he was secretary of defense under President George H. W. Bush (1989-93), he pursued and managed the 1991 war against Iraq. He was later the CEO of Halliburton Oil Services Company (1995-2000), an appropriate post for someone who waged war in energy-rich West Asia. He squeezed every dollar of profit possible through the theft of the world’s natural resources.
‘We’ll start with a quail hunt and I’ll shoot one bullet in your head for each Iraqi you killed.’ Credit: Alan Cavanagh
As George W. Bush’s vice president (2001-09), he appeared, more than anyone else, to be running the White House. Immediately following the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, Cheney kept Bush Jr. in Florida or in Air Force 1, that is, away from his post, and gave orders from a bunker in the capital.
Cheney then met regularly with a select group of administration militarists to plot the 2003 invasion of Iraq. They would exploit the fear created by the 9/11 attack to justify this war, culminating in the Big Lie about weapons of mass destruction. Their goal was to turn sovereign Iraq into a docile U.S. neocolony.
Cheney promised this war would have few U.S. casualties and be low-cost and short. It wound up lasting eight years and cost nearly $2 trillion, with 4,400 U.S. troops officially killed and over 30,000 wounded. Also, over 1 million Iraqis were killed and 5 million displaced.
Massive protests took place around the world in 2003 against the Iraq war promoted by Dick Cheney.
Meanwhile, he eliminated protections in the U.S. for dissent and protest, again leaning on fear and the “war on terror.” In pursuit of that war (and the takeover of oil wells), he promoted torture in interrogations.
One might think that their common class interests, common criminal acts and common excessive lying would make allies of Trump and Cheney. But no. Remember this is a period of U.S. imperialist decline from its peak power in the early 1990s. Despite the learned book on the subject, history didn’t end. And world capitalism exploded in crisis in 2008-09.
Cheney and his co-thinkers apparently believed that Trump’s way of governing was accelerating that decline. For example, Trump’s appointments of officials based on how quickly they say “How high?” when he asks them to jump.
The gratuitous offenses against Canada, a major U.S. ally and trading partner. The threat to seize Greenland, now still a semi-colony of Denmark, one of the staunchest U.S. allies in Europe. Tariffs wielded as bargaining chips. All these Trumpian policies contribute to making the U.S. not only a declining empire, but an unreliable declining empire.
A section of the U.S. ruling class is forced to observe the unappealing spectacle of governments presenting the U.S. president with gifts, plaques, luxury airplanes and even crowns to flatter him. It’s their obvious attempt to appease someone they perceive as the unstable commander in chief of the world’s most powerful destruction machine and gatekeeper of the world’s largest luxury market.
The old State Department and CIA hands must be contemplating the rapid unraveling of 80 years of cautious diplomacy with the U.S.’s imperialist allies. So despite his crimes, they praise Cheney for criticizing Trump. Neither the MAGA nor anti-MAGA imperialists, however, can stop the decline of U.S. imperialism.
