csua.org/u/76f -> www.guardian.co.uk/uselections2004/comment/story/0,14259,1209134,00.html
Senator John Kerry must make ridding the White House of Dick Cheney as central to his campaign as replacing President George Bush. Bob Woodward's book Plan of Attack, his description of how the administration became hellbent on war, is really an account of just how much Mr Cheney was running things. From the viewpoint of the secretary of state, Colin Powell, the vice-president was fixated to the point of obsession on the need for a military strike to remove Saddam Hussein. Intelligence analysts felt he brought pressure to bear at the CIA to make its assessments of Iraq's weapons programmes and links with al-Qaida fit with the White House's policy objectives. If America is wondering why its young are daily dying in a foreign land for an uncertain goal, Woodward's view is that Mr Cheney willed it from the moment he stepped into the Old Executive Office Building, next door to the White House. Mr Cheney harboured a long-felt sense of unfinished business from his time as defence secretary during the first Gulf war, when his advice that the allied forces should press on to Baghdad was overruled. This time, now he was just a heartbeat away from the presidency, things would be different. There is no other example in history of a vice-president with such influence over the major policy decisions of the White House. Once the election campaign is over, they are supposed to be neither seen nor heard unless it is to attend the funeral of a second-tier leader. While being careful never to upstage Mr Bush in public, he has steered the political direction of the presidency from day one. He urged Mr Bush not to be cowed into a timid first term, despite being the first president elected without securing the most votes in over a century. And just as America slipped into recession, he advocated forcing a vote on a mammoth tax cut that created the largest budget deficit in history. He insisted on convening an energy task force that met in secret and released no details of its deliberations, made up of Mr Bush's and Mr Cheney's oil and gas buddies, just as corporate scandals unravelled boardrooms across the country. It became clear during this week's supreme court hearings about the legality of the task force's secrecy that one of the people offering his advice to the task force was their old pal Kenneth "Kenny Boy" Lay of Enron. Mr Cheney's resistance to the efforts of Congress to open up the minutes of those meetings has continued at the supreme court. The court will decide this summer whether protection of executive privilege outweighs the public's right to know what went on in the meetings, which coincided with California's power meltdown. As California tried to avoid implementing rolling blackouts in spring 2001, Mr Cheney, fresh from his tte--tte with the energy barons, decreed that the federal government would not impose energy price caps to ease the pain of the California public. While the energy task force was still lobbying Mr Cheney, Mr Lay told California's then governor, Gray Davis, that the only way out was to let the free market set the price. We can only assume he gave the same self-serving advice to Dick Cheney. After Enron went belly up, in late 2001, internal documents proved the extent to which the company had been gaming California's energy markets, creating bottlenecks to artificially drive up demand and shutting down power plants to shrink supply and inflate their profits. All this went on with the tacit approval of a vice-president who was pushing for deregulated energy markets in all states. Mr Cheney was about to launch a brave new energy policy that would export the California experience nationwide. Only Enron's demise and the subsequent wave of corporate scandals put this lunacy on hold. If the supreme court rules to open up the proceedings of the energy meetings to public scrutiny, it will surely offer a damning illustration of how this White House puts corporate greed above the most basic needs of the ordinary citizen. Perhaps that uncertain goal for which Americans are dying isn't so uncertain after all.
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