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No Cheney mea culpa for war dead

Marina Hyde

Dick Cheney should be asked how his recent feelings compare with those he felt at the first casualty in Iraq?

LAST WEEK, millions of people turned on their TV sets to hear words of regret they never imagined anyone from the Bush administration would utter. "Ultimately," said Dick Cheney, "I'm the guy who pulled the trigger."

In fairness, it was always going to be tough for the United States Vice-President to pin his accidental shooting of a hunting buddy on anyone else (although I wouldn't rule out whispers of a quail insurgency in the coming days). Yet Mr. Cheney's mea culpa made a shocking impact against the backdrop of a political climate — on both sides of the Atlantic — where the concept of "taking responsibility" has been debased beyond all recognition.

The general consensus seems to be that the real damage was done by the Vice-President not speaking out sooner, but having endured several airings of his still perma-looped interview with Fox News, I can't help feeling that that verdict is misplaced. What are the more pervasive criticisms that attach themselves to Mr. Cheney? Are they allegations of secrecy? Obsessive news management? I am not sure those things strike a deep chord with what we might unsatisfactorily refer to as average Americans. But the image of Mr. Cheney as a rich man, the ultimate corporate crony who understands nothing of life's harsher realities: this has been the one that has defined him ever since he gave up his post running Halliburton to be George Bush's number two. And it is this characterisation which is shored up by that ghastly, dolorous news interview, where the overriding sense is of a cossetted creature who has just been forced to confront possible death and personal responsibility for the very first time; a man who has hitherto had the luxury of conceiving of both in abstract, theoretical terms, and has suddenly had their true meaning revealed to him in the most personal of ways.

Not for the first time when contemplating Mr. Cheney, I found myself put powerfully in mind of Arthur Miller's All My Sons. In that play, that savage indictment of wartime profiteering, Miller's anti-hero is Joe Keller, a businessman who knowingly dispatches defective airplane parts to the very front on which his son is stationed. Though his son never flies the same model of plane, the audience discovers that he was driven to undertake a suicidal mission by the deaths of his colleagues who did and never came back, and by the discovery that back home his father has shifted all blame for the situation on to his partner. Ultimately, Joe Keller's realisation is that his guilt is inescapable, that his public responsiblities are indivisible from his personal ones. "Sure, he was my son," runs his devastating final line. "But I think to him they were all my sons. And I guess they were, I guess they were."

Even without the Halliburton profiteering analogies, comparisons between the Vice-President and Miller's capitalist-brought-low are enormously seductive. Half close your ears during Mr. Cheney's interview, and you could almost fancy you were hearing the first faltering admissions of responsibility for the quagmire the Bush administration's Iraq adventure has long been. "I'm the guy who pulled the trigger ..." "The image ... is something I will never be able to get out of my head." "You can't blame anybody else." Who knows, had the exclusive been granted to anyone other than Fox News, perhaps the interviewer might have asked how the feeling compared with the first U.S. casualty in Iraq, or the 1,000th, or the 10,000th Iraqi civilian death.

But we didn't get the "they were all my hunting buddies" speech. This is a man who places his narrow responsibility to his circle of friends far above his wider responsibility to the American people.

- Guardian Newspapers Limited 2006

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