Thanks, Ms D -
Hearty thanks to Joan Didion, who has sat down with the record and concluded that Vice President Cheney's ideology, if he has one, could be summarized as effecting "the transfer of public wealth to the private sector." Those are my words, not Ms Didion's, and I published them last May. Once I'd reached that conclusion, I found that it made so much sense that I couldn't imagine any other. It is the only explanation that makes sense of White House policies.
Here are Ms Didion's words:
"Other priorities" suggests what the Vice President might have meant when he and the President talked about the "different kind of war," the war in which "our goal will not be achieved overnight." As a member of the House during the cold war and then as secretary of defense during the Gulf War and then as CEO of Halliburton, the Vice President had seen up close the way in which a war in which "our goal will not be achieved overnight" could facilitate the flow of assets from the government to the private sector and back to whoever in Washington greases the valves.
As Ms Didion notes, we won't need to send more troops to Iraq if we just contract out more of the war to private contractors. Ms Didion's essay, "Cheney: The Fatal Touch," covering sixteen books, appears in the current issue of The New York Review of Books. (5 October 2006)
