Is Dick Cheney mentally ill?

There is no doubt that the foreign policy of the Bush administration has been an utter failure. Larry Johnson asks

George Bush has shown us that a weak, not-too-bright leader, can really cock things up on the foreign policy front even when surrounded by senior folks with scads of foreign policy experience. (How can a team comprised of Don Rumsfeld, Colin Powell, and Dick Cheney mess things up so badly?)

Good question, so let's look at what has happened to foreign policy under Bush 43.

The key foreign policy person in the Bush administration as been Vice President Dick Cheney. Cheney was the organizer of the incoming Bush administration in 2000 - 2001. He was personally responsible for choosing the political appointees to be placed throughout the top ranks of the Executive Branch. Cheney placed his acolytes throughout the government. By doing that, he gained the loyalty of those to whom he gave jobs, which gave him more power than anyone in the Executive branch outside of Bush himself.

The other event that was important was based on Bush's well-known ignorance of foreign policy when he was first elected. In preparation for his 2000 election campaign he had brought Dick Cheney in to tutor him on foreign policy - a job which Bush expanded to asking Cheney to find a candidate for Vice President. Cheney found himself. With that history and Bush's well-known distaste for the grubby details of management and policy, it is not any surprise that Bush abdicated foreign policy to Dick Cheney. Cheney then isolated and effectively neutered the Secretary of State, Colin Powell, and let Rumsfeld play with the organization of the Pentagon and the military toys it would use. No surprise there. Rumsfeld's military experience was as an aviator. Hardware and organization are more important than foreign policy. It is a truism that winning wars is first logistics, and only after that strategy and tactics matter. With the Department of State left out of policy-making Cheney was left to make conduct the actual foreign policy through the Pentagon.

So America's foreign policy has been the direct responsibility of Vice President Dick Cheney since 2001.

Dick himself has, I think, become extremely paranoid at least in part as a result of his heart trouble. This is one occasional side effect of heart trouble. In addition, he was attracted to the NeoCons who explained to him the views of the Israelis in the Middle East (Dick trusts the Israelis a lot more than the CIA. They certainly have experience in the Middle East which the CIA, focusing on the USSR, has never had.) Combine that with Cheney's impatience with bureaucracy in general (a characteristic of conservatism is that only results matter, and the process gets in the way of the anticipated and therefore right results - a very different attitude from that of good Intelligence analysts) and his belief that the CIA especially as well as most of the non-military Intelligence community was out to get him personally (see Paranoia above), and this gives us the results we have seen during the Bush administration.

Is there a good reason to believe that Cheney is likely to be paranoid? Consider his medical history.

CNN provided a summary of Dick Cheney's heart problems up to July 2001.

• 1978 - first heart attack.
• 1984 - another heart attack.
• 1988 - third heart attack before age 48 resulting in quadruple bypass surgery. This was considered to have stabilized him, so that he had no follow ups after 1994.
• November 22, 2000 - "a very slight heart attack" which led doctors to insert "a coronary stent to prop open a narrowed artery".
• March 5, 2001 - new chest pain and discomfort which leads to an "urgent" procedure to re-open the blocked heart artery treated in November.
• June 29, 2001 - Doctors inserted a pacemaker that includes a defibrillator.

The New York Times article entitled “Mental Decline Is Linked To Heart Bypass Surgery” points to the likelihood that open heart surgery causes brain damage because of interrupted blood flow to the brain. From the New York Times article

Five years after heart bypass surgery, 42 percent of patients show a significant decline on tests of mental ability, probably from brain damage caused by the surgery, doctors from Duke University say in a new study.

Older patients and those with a drop in test scores soon after surgery were most likely to show declines five years later.

With Cheney's history of heart problems that almost certainly themselves reduced blood flow to the brain, he would be a strong candidate to be among the 42 percent of patients who showed decline of mental ability.

Ten weeks after the surgery to insert the pacemaker with defibrillator was September 11, 2001. It would be very reasonable to assume that Dick Cheney's reaction to the threat represented by the 9/11 events would call forth a highly paranoid reaction.

As an unsupervised elected official, there is no one with the power to evaluate or control Dick Cheney outside of George Bush. It is obvious that Bush does not exert such control.

This is not to say that the clearly paranoid nature of the Bush administration foreign policy can be blamed on Dick Cheney's heart trouble. Cheney has always been one of the most extreme conservatives in the Republican Party. Conservatives are described in Bob Altemeyer's book The Authoritarians. They base election campaigns on fear that is intended to drive voters to the security offered by those with the image of a strong, certain leader. Such leaders prefer the military model to the diplomatic model because the entire process of diplomacy is murky and uncertain. But I really think that Cheney's paranoia contributes to the right-wing extremism of this administration.

Is Cheney mentally ill? I can't say for certain, but I think it is highly likely.