Dick Cheney Is Why Donald Trump Must Face Consequences

America is on an ever-escalating path of executive lawlessness. If we want it to stop, this administration must be prosecuted.

It is challenging to understand the degree of human suffering caused by America’s post-9/11 wars. We can recount the death toll, but even that doesn’t do it justice. The 7,052 American service members killed in action don’t convey the agony of PTSD and psychological wounds that ruin families and have driven 140,000 veterans to suicide over the last twenty years.¹ The nearly 400,000 civilian deaths, with over half coming from the Iraq War alone, don’t speak to the unquantifiable horror America has brought to the Middle East and Persia. Every lost life represents at least a hundred other ruined existences: families forced to flee their homes, children crying from hunger, the daily struggle of living in a country destabilized by imperialism, and the never-ending lecture by those who bombed your home and threw your life into chaos that you should thank them for bringing you “freedom.” Torture, starvation, famine, disease, and war. These are the results of America’s global War on Terror. The survivors share stories that make us wonder if we could last a day in their condition. The dead are cast aside as an unfortunate footnote, the cost of America’s “mistake.”

Last week, Dick Cheney, the architect of our imperialist crimes, received a privilege he denied to roughly a million people. Unlike his victims, whose last moments were filled with agony and despair, Dick Cheney died free and peaceful.

As was his life, Cheney’s death is an indictment of the United States of America. Preemptive war is a crime under international law. So is torture. Cheney not only committed both; he made every American a co-conspirator by manipulating intelligence and state-captured media to sell the public on a war he knew was pointless. The Iraq War is often called a “mistake.” There was no mistake. Dick Cheney and George W. Bush got precisely what they wanted. Dead Arabs. Another colonial outpost in the Middle East. Personal enrichment. An empowered Israel. Four subsequent administrations escalating their cornerstone achievement of an evermore belligerent, shockingly violent foreign policy. Calling Cheney’s war a “mistake” is a convenient lie Americans like to tell ourselves to avoid accepting the uncomfortable truth that we are the world’s leading producers of death and destruction.

As we’re now forced to live with a fascist administration that makes George W. Bush’s look like a Boy Scout troop, we must ask how we got here. The undeniable reason that our military is murdering South American boaters, ICE is speed-running the Gestapo playbook, and the executive branch is a crime syndicate is because villains such as Dick Cheney were never punished. Going forward, that must change.

Dick Cheney and Collin Powell