Roberto Abraham Scaruffi

June 21, 2012 Tomgram: Michael Klare, The Cheney Effect (in the Obama Administration) [Note for TomDispatch Readers: We would like to offer a deep bow to all those who have stepped up to support TomDispatch recently.  We do our best to frame our difficult world provocatively and we do so for free.  We’d like to thank those of you who have shown that this site matters to you through donations that genuinely do keep us chugging along.  If you’ve come to rely on TomDispatch to make sense of our vexing world and to read articles and analyses you just can’t find anywhere else, we hope you’ll consider making a tax-deductible donation of any amount or take advantage of our latest offer: a copy of our new book, Terminator Planet: The First History of Drone Warfare, 2001-2050 -- personalized and signed by both Nick Turse and me -- for a contribution of $75 (or more).  To check out that and other book offers, please visit our donation page by clicking here.  And yes, we swear that we’ll take a break from these pleas for aid soon! Tom] Back in September 2001, Dick Cheney was, according to Jane Mayer in The Dark Side, being chauffeured around Washington “in an armored motorcade that varied its route to foil possible attackers."  In the backseat of his car (just in case), adds Mayer, "rested a duffel bag stocked with a gas mask and a biochemical survival suit." And lest danger rear its head, "rarely did he travel without a medical doctor in tow." Ah, weren’t those the days?  How quiet, how boring his life must be now, his new ticker in place, hosting fundraisers for Mitt Romney in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, auctioning off lunches with himself for charity, and -- for a little genuine excitement -- slamming President Obama as an “unmitigated disaster.”  And yet, what if thousands of miles from Washington, years from his "taking off the gloves” heyday, promoting “enhanced interrogation techniques,” and plunking for invasions in the Greater Middle East, his ghost still lives in the nation's capital, and not in some vague way somewhere in the Republican opposition, but deep in the beating heart of the Obama administration.  It’s the sort of thought that should take you aback and yet Michael Klare, TomDispatch regular and author most recently ofThe Race for What’s Left: The Global Scramble for the World’s Last Resources, makes the case that the Cheney ticker is beating hard right now in President Obama’s chest.  Don’t believe it?  Then, take a deep dive into Cheney’s... I mean, Obama’s world. (To catch Timothy MacBain's latest Tomcast audio interview in which Klare discusses imperial geopolitics as the default mode for Washington since 1945, click here or download it to your iPod here.) Tom Is Barack Obama Morphing Into Dick Cheney?  Four Ways the President Is Pursuing Cheney’s Geopolitics of Global Energy  By Michael T. Klare As details of his administration’s global war against terrorists, insurgents, and hostile warlords have become more widely known -- a war that involves a mélange of drone attacks, covert operations, and presidentially selected assassinations -- President Obama has beencompared to President George W. Bush in his appetite for military action.  “As shown through his stepped-up drone campaign,” Aaron David Miller, an advisor to six secretaries of state, wrote at Foreign Policy, “Barack Obama has become George W. Bush on steroids.” When it comes to international energy politics, however, it is not Bush but his vice president, Dick Cheney, who has been providing the role model for the president.  As recent events have demonstrated, Obama’s energy policies globally bear an eerie likeness to Cheney’s, especially in the way he has engaged in the geopolitics of oil as part of an American global struggle for future dominance among the major powers. More than any of the other top officials of the Bush administration -- many with oil-company backgrounds -- Cheney focused on the role of energy in global power politics.  From 1995 to 2000, he served as chairman of the board and chief executive officer of Halliburton, a major supplier of services to the oil industry.  Soon after taking office as vice president he was asked by Bush to devise a new national energy strategy that has largely governed U.S. policy ever since. Click here to read more of this dispatch.