If you haven’t already, be sure to check out[tag] Robert Dreyfuss[/tag]’ stunning American Prospect story on Dick [tag]Cheney[/tag]’s hyper-secretive, strikingly powerful White House operation. Speculation about how Cheney controls an insular group of ideologues is, if anything, understating the case. (via Kevin Drum)
Notoriously opaque, the Office of the [tag]Vice President[/tag] ([tag]OVP[/tag]) is very difficult for journalists to penetrate. But a Prospect investigation shows that the key to Cheney’s influence lies with the corps of hard-line acolytes he assembled in 2001. They serve not only as his eyes and ears, monitoring a federal bureaucracy that resists many of Cheney’s pet initiatives, but sometimes serve as his fists, too, when the man from Wyoming feels that the passive-aggressive bureaucrats need bullying. Like disciplined Bolsheviks slicing through a fractious opposition, Cheney’s team operates with a single-minded, ideological focus on the exercise of American military power, a belief in the untrammeled power of the presidency, and a fierce penchant for secrecy. […]
At the high-water mark of neoconservative power, when coalition forces invaded Iraq in March 2003, the vice president’s office was the command center for a web of like-minded officials in the [tag]White House[/tag], the Pentagon, the State Department, and other agencies, often described by former officials as “Dick Cheney’s spies.” Now, thanks to a misguided war and a bungled occupation, along with a string of foreign-policy failures that have alienated U.S. allies and triggered a wave of anti-American feeling around the globe, the numbers and influence of those Cheneyites outside the office have receded. No longer quite so commanding, the office seems more like a bunker for neoconservatives and their fellow travelers in the administration. Yet if only because of Dick Cheney’s Rasputin-like hold over the president, his office remains a formidable power indeed.
Despite having gotten every major policy question wrong since Bush took office in 2001, Cheney’s office manages an uncomfortable level of control — which is executed in secret and with such independence that “Cheney’s spies” help kill major initiatives by the State Department and the NSC whenever they think they should.
What’s more, Dreyfuss explained that Cheney assembled a “shadow NSC,” filled with loyalists, ideologues, and think-tank partisans, which operates independently — from everyone.
According to Wilkerson, Cheney’s office and the NSC were completely separate on foreign policy. Cheney, says Wilkerson, “set up a staff that knew what the statutory NSC was doing, but the NSC statutory staff didn’t know what his staff was doing. The vice president’s staff could read the statutory NSC’s e-mail, but the NSC couldn’t read their e-mail. So, once someone on the statutory NSC figured it out, they used various work-arounds. Like, for example, they would walk to someone’s office, rather than send an e-mail, if what they were going to talk about they didn’t want to reveal to the vice president’s very powerful staff.” But that was difficult because of Cheney “spies” within the bureaucracy, including people like John Bolton at the State Department, Robert Joseph at the NSC, certain staffers at WINPAC (the arms control shop at CIA), and various Pentagon officials, he adds.
And how does [tag]Bush[/tag] figure into all of this? One White House insider told Dreyfuss that the president isn’t, shall we say, well informed.
“The president is given only the most basic notions about the Korea issue. They tell him, ‘Above South Korea is a country called North Korea. It is an evil regime.’ … So that translates into a presidential decision: Why enter into any agreement with an evil regime?”
A power-hungry Vice President who operates in [tag]secret[/tag] with a small army of ideologues and a President who is lectured to like a child. It’s quite a White House.