OZYMANDIAS by Percy Bysshe Shelley, written two years after Napoleon's final defeat at Waterloo, has been used again and again to illustrate the vanity and hubris of an empire gone to ruin. A traveler speaks of “two vast and trunkless legs of stone” standing in the desert, with a “shattered visage” lying beside them in the sand. They say you get something new from a poem every time you read it, and I had not noticed before how exactly Shelley described our Vice President Dick Cheney: “A shattered visage whose frown/And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command/Tell that its sculptor well those passions read.” The poem is reprinted as an introduction to Robert Merry's “Sands of Empire,” which takes no notice of the physical resemblance, but has plenty to say about the vice president. Cheney gets near top billing in the national catastrophe that he and George W. Bush have wrought. It was Cheney who said, “I really believe we will be greeted as liberators (in Iraq).” It was Cheney who formed his own parallel national security apparatus to cherry-pick intelligence on weapons of mass destruction. And it was Cheney who pushed the bogus connection between Al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein. Ultimately, of course, the blame lies with Bush, essentially a weak president hiding behind his bluster, who came to office too willing to delegate too much responsibility, and chose to make Cheney the most influential and powerful vice president in history. The Cheney influence has been hard to miss. Whether it was sticking to the most impractical hard line on foreign policy, or advocating torture, or curbing civil liberties, Cheney's fingerprints were always there. As an excessive nationalist, he came to the office hoping to restore presidential powers that he saw lost after Vietnam. The tragedy of Sept. 11 gave him his chance to grab for executive power. Cheney wasn't alone in exploiting Sept. 11 to promote a long-held agenda. Donald Rumsfeld used the tragedy as a chance to prove his theories about a lighter, faster military. The neo-conservatives used Sept. 11 to sell their agenda of using American power to spread democracy and protect American hegemony. And Bush, too, used Sept. 11, hoping to transform his life into something more meaningful, a war leader. According to Merry, it was the foreign policy nationalists, Cheney and Rumsfeld, signing on to the neo-conservative agenda that sealed the invasion of Iraq, the greatest foreign policy mistake of our time. Merry wonders how the cautious, neo-conservative view that “life is infinitely complex, and thus the ability to change the world is limited” transmogrified into remaking the Mideast in America's image, the most reckless attempt at social engineering imaginable. It used to be that the Bush team followed the dictum that anything the Clinton administration had done was to be despised and repudiated. The Bush team was going to think really big and make history-changing moves. But much of the second term has been spent trying to stem the disasters of the first. Whereas our allies were once scorned, now we are trying to patch up the old alliances. Whereas we once refused to deal with North Korea because it was part of the “axis of evil,” now we have a deal that is remarkably like the one Clinton had. Whereas we once refused to deal with Iran for much the same reasons - we don't talk to evil, we defeat evil - today the Bush administration is trying a diplomatic approach. In fact, for better or ill, foreign policy today is looking more like that of Clinton administration's, including a last-minute push to revive an Israel-Palestinian deal. Many of Cheney's hard-line allies from the first term are gone: the discredited Rumsfeld; Paul Wolfowitz, the architect of the Iraq war; Douglas Feith; Scooter Libby. The vice president's office may be the last power center in Washington that wants war with Iran. When it comes to the Cheney legacy, Shelley has it right: broken-off feet, the sneering visage in the desert of history, a “colossal wreck, boundless and bare/The lone and level sands stretch far away.” __
