He Was a War Profiteer
Richard B. Cheney, the man who turned the White House into a command post for the end of reason and the Middle East into a bonfire of American ambition, died Monday, November 3, 2025, at eighty-four. Complications of pneumonia and cardiac disease, his family said, a fitting end for a man who outlived his own heart twice. He survived five heart attacks, two major surgeries, and the long moral decay of the republic he helped shape, only to fall when history had finally stopped shouting his name.
He was a war profiteer without a warm pulse, a grim accountant of empire who sent the tail end of Generation X and the millennials to fight his forever wars. Under his shadow, defense contractors like Halliburton, where he had served as CEO, and its subsidiary Kellogg Brown & Root (KBR), secured billions in no-bid contracts under the Restore Iraqi Oil (RIO) program, quietly awarded in March 2003.
Cheney resigned from Halliburton in August 2000, only after joining George W. Bush’s ticket. Within three years, the company he once led was feeding off the war he helped design. They peddled coincidence as gospel while his deferred checks cleared, $398,548 in 2001 alone. We were told this was normal: that a former CEO could occupy the vice presidency while his old firm filled its coffers from the conflicts he championed, as America’s debt soared and a generation bled.
Cheney’s brand of shadow politics left an imprint on American power that still hasn’t faded. He once told Senator Patrick Leahy, who had the audacity to question Halliburton’s Iraq contracts, to “go f*** yourself,” and meant it. The remark was small, but it revealed everything: the contempt, the certainty, the conviction that the rules were written for other men. When told in 2008 that two-thirds of Americans opposed the Iraq War, he answered, “So?” and added that leaders couldn’t be “blown off course by the fluctuations in public opinion polls.” He had already warned, after 9/11, that America would need to “work the dark side,” paving the way for torture, black sites, and indefinite detention. Later, asked about the waterboarding of detainees, some of them innocent, he said he had “no problem” with it and would “do it again in a minute.” When Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill raised concerns about ballooning deficits, Cheney shrugged: “Reagan proved deficits don’t matter.”
He claimed he had “no financial interest” in Halliburton. SEC filings said otherwise. Even after peppering his friend Harry Whittington with birdshot during a Texas quail hunt, he owned it flatly, while his friend apologized.
This was Cheney’s gift: to strip power of apology. He made ruthlessness look like leadership, cruelty like conviction. In his world, results justified everything: war, torture, deceit, and the only sin was hesitation.
The former vice president shaped my life in ways I couldn’t see then. I remember cheering the invasion of Iraq, convinced we were the good guys, toppling a tyrant. Three years later, I was in uniform, a military policeman deployed to the Sunni Triangle in 2009, manning a machine gun on an MRAP. I patrolled routes laced with IEDs that Halliburton’s convoys had to navigate, the same convoys insured by policies written in blood and budgeted in trillions. Back home, his old firm cashed in. I came home older, poorer, and awake to the quiet logic of profit in our wars. He never wore the uniform. Five draft deferments kept him safe through Vietnam, each one a calculation that other men’s sons would do the dying.
Halliburton’s revenue jumped from $12 billion in 2002 to over $20 billion by 2006. KBR pulled more than $16 billion from Iraq by mid-decade, per audits. Pentagon investigators flagged $1.8 billion in questionable costs on a single logistics order. Cheney dismissed it all as partisan noise. He retired to a mansion in McLean, Virginia, built atop a $1.35 million lot, where the only explosions were the controlled burns on his quail-hunting estate.
His foreign policy cast a long shadow over every presidency that followed. By 2022, when Russia invaded Ukraine under the false pretense of “regime change” and “bioweapons labs,” as if mocking our own justifications from twenty years before, the United States was too weary of war to respond decisively. We had just withdrawn from Afghanistan, ending a twenty-year campaign that might have been salvaged had we not bled it dry to chase phantoms in Iraq. That detour, Cheney’s detour, drained the world’s appetite for intervention and left a vacuum where resolve once lived. Eastern Europe paid the price in blood, as it so often has when the West loses its nerve.
Wanting to wash Iraq’s residue from my conscience, I went to fight in Ukraine. I had seen what becomes of smaller nations when empires invent their justifications. On the front, I met others who carried the same burden, veterans of Cheney’s wars, chasing atonement in Donbas mud, still trying to undo the moral damage inflicted by Cheney and the generation of politicians who turned war into an industry and called it duty.
Cheney is dead; his empire intact, our ledgers bled. I am alive, but my friends are not. My team leader in Iraq took his own life. Another sergeant followed. Their deaths won’t make the news. Their wars won’t be remembered. Cheney’s heart may have failed mechanically, but it was never there to begin with, just like his conscience. He leaves behind no moral legacy, only balance sheets and a generation that paid in blood for his convictions. History will remember him as he was: a man who mistook power for purpose and built an empire on the belief that he could never be wrong.
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Today, I’ll look in the mirror and wonder if my service was ever worth thanking: if it ever served the country I believed in, or only men like him.
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