Former US Vice President Dick Cheney who was a leading advocate for the invasion of Iraq has died at the age of 84, his family has said.
The hard-charging conservative served alongside Republican President George W Bush for two terms between 2001 and 2009.
Cheney was the chief architect of the ‘war on terror’ and was in office on the morning of 9/11.
He has been described as one of the most powerful and polarizing vice presidents in modern US history.
However, years after leaving office, Cheney became a target of President Donald Trump.
His daughter Liz Cheney became the leading Republican critic and examiner of Trump’s desperate attempts to stay in power after his election defeat.
‘In our nation’s 246-year history, there has never been an individual who was a greater threat to our republic than Donald Trump,’ Cheney said in a television ad for his daughter.
‘He tried to steal the last election using lies and violence to keep himself in power after the voters had rejected him. He is a coward.’
In a twist the Democrats of his era could never have imagined, Dick Cheney said last year he was voting for their candidate, Kamala Harris, for president against Trump.
Dick Cheney, the former US Vice President, has died at the age of 84, his family has said
A survivor of five heart attacks, Cheney long thought he was living on borrowed time and declared in 2013 he now awoke each morning ‘with a smile on my face, thankful for the gift of another day,’ an odd image for a figure who always seemed to be manning the ramparts.
His vice presidency defined by the age of terrorism, Cheney disclosed that he had had the wireless function of his defibrillator turned off years earlier out of fear terrorists would remotely send his heart a fatal shock.
In his time in office, no longer was the vice presidency merely a ceremonial afterthought. Instead, Cheney made it a network of back channels from which to influence policy on Iraq, terrorism, presidential powers, energy and other cornerstones of a conservative agenda.
Fixed with a seemingly permanent half-smile – detractors called it a smirk – Cheney joked about his outsize reputation as a stealthy manipulator.
‘Am I the evil genius in the corner that nobody ever sees come out of his hole?’ he asked. ‘It’s a nice way to operate, actually.’
A hard-liner on Iraq who was increasingly isolated as other hawks left government, Cheney was proved wrong on point after point in the Iraq War, without ever losing the conviction that he was essentially right.
He alleged links between the 2001 attacks against the United States and prewar Iraq that didn’t exist. He said U.S. troops would be welcomed as liberators; they weren’t.
He declared the Iraqi insurgency in its last throes in May 2005, back when 1,661 U.S. service members had been killed, not even half the toll by war’s end.
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