Word: cheney
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...Read "What's Behind Dick Cheney's New Attacks...
...also coincided with the darkest period of the Administration: the Iraq war's dramatic downturn, the absence of WMD and festering problems in Afghanistan. And it unfolded as Bush was launching a wholesale course correction of his presidency in his second term. The pivot was hard to miss. Where Cheney had urged unilateral U.S. action in the first term, "in the second term we're going to be doing more diplomacy," Bush told top aides. Where Cheney had orchestrated a secret push to embrace the "dark side" in the war on terrorism, Bush instructed aides in 2005 to begin...
...Longtime Cheney ally Donald Rumsfeld was eased out as Pentagon chief in late 2006, and Bush replaced him with Robert Gates, a former CIA director and Bush-family ally. Gates was as effective a bureaucratic player as Cheney - and much more of a pragmatist. "Bush was persuaded that the day of the neoconservatives had to be over, because the direction of his presidency had become politically unsustainable," says a well-informed adviser. "It wasn't so much a repudiation of Cheney or Cheneyism but a practical judgment that the previous approach simply wasn't working." (See America's worst Vice...
...Cheney fought some of these initiatives all the way, "taking it upon himself," as a top adviser put it, to make the hard-line national-security case to the President. Cheney didn't lose every fight, but he was no longer winning them all either. And his backup vanished. Pentagon official Paul Wolfowitz moved to the World Bank in early 2005. Libby was indicted in October of that year and left the government. John Bolton resigned his post as U.S. ambassador to the U.N. the same month Rumsfeld left the Pentagon in 2006. Cheney's allies no longer manned...
...officials and plenty of stories about Bush's dismal approval ratings as he prepared to leave town. But the "elephant in the room," as an adviser puts it, was the still unresolved case of Libby. Many in the West Wing feared that the matter threatened to rend Bush and Cheney's relationship because of the intensity of Cheney's campaign for a full and final pardon...