Dick Cheney and the Shadow of 9/11

The Rise Neocon Project

Across much of the world, Dick Cheney was once regarded as a near-demonic figure - an architect of wars, revolutions, and global upheavals. Even today, the most common adjective attached to news of his passing is simply: “sinister.”

For decades, Cheney occupied the position of a shadow statesman, a figure operating behind presidents, cabinets, and public institutions. He was seen - by supporters and critics alike - as a dark demiurge of American power.

Cheney harbored a deep ideological hostility toward Russia, and he played a decisive role in lobbying for the separation of Ukraine - something George H.W. Bush himself had viewed with caution.

Yet Cheney’s reputation was not shaped abroad alone.
Inside the United States, his name evokes an unusually intense political resentment - matched perhaps only by his closest political partner, Donald Rumsfeld.

The Cheney - Rumsfeld Axis

When Donald Rumsfeld died in 2021, American social media filled with macabre humor. One widely shared cartoon showed a devil at the reception desk in Hell, directing Rumsfeld toward the “War Crimes Section” with a placard declaring “No breakfast. Ever.” The punchline referenced Rumsfeld’s famously cryptic 2002 press briefing:

“There are known knowns… known unknowns… and unknown unknowns.”

Both men cultivated, and arguably reveled in, this aura of strategic opacity.
They were masters of political obfuscation.

Cheney became the face of hard power in the early 2000s not by accident. His rise began under President George H.W. Bush: the First Gulf War was in many ways his strategic blueprint. Under George W. Bush - widely perceived as politically dependent on his advisers - Cheney governed military and foreign policy with almost no internal counterbalance, especially during the administration’s first term.

It was during that period that the foundations were laid for the Iraq War, the War on Terror, the expansion of the intelligence-security state

And it was under Cheney’s watch that September 11, 2001 became the defining rupture of American foreign policy.

The Neocon Ascendancy

Cheney’s influence was inseparable from the rise of the neoconservative establishment - a network of policymakers, strategists, ideologues, think-tank operatives, media figures, and lobbyists. In 2001, the neocons occupied the White House, the Pentagon, the CIA, the State Department, major U.S. media institutions

Within American political culture, this network has often been referred to as a cabal - a term even mainstream U.S. journalists employ, though carefully.

Cheney and Rumsfeld were not the philosophical architects. Rather, they served as front-men - public executives concealing the intellectual origins of the movement.

Those origins lay in the Chicago School of neoliberal economics (Milton Friedman), and yhe Straussian tradition of political philosophy (Leo Strauss), with its doctrines of “noble lies” and elite guidance of the masses.

Rumsfeld attended Strauss-adjacent seminars in Chicago as a young congressman, becoming a liaison between neoliberal economic elites and neoconservative strategic thinkers. Cheney, a Yale graduate working as a congressional intern, was drawn into Rumsfeld’s orbit early. Their careers would track one another for five decades.

By the time of Reagan and Bush Sr., the neocon network had formed a durable power bloc. Under George W. Bush, it attained near-total dominance. The outcome was the First and Second Iraq Wars, the restructuring of the Middle East, the rise of ISIS, the Arab Spring … a sequence that reshaped global politics and destabilized entire regions.

The Conservative Backlash

This project triggered, eventually, a counter-reaction among traditional American conservatives - first in the form of the Tea Party movement, and later in the rise of Donald Trump.

It is no accident that today Cheney and his circle consider Trump the greatest domestic threat, and Trump’s supporters regard the neocons as the architects of national decline

Cheney made the split explicit in 2022 when he declared:

“In 246 years of American history, no individual has posed a greater threat to our Republic than Donald Trump.”

He later admitted he voted for Kamala Harris.

The neocons have since shifted formally into the Democratic foreign-policy establishment.
The war in Ukraine, and the escalation in the Middle East, both originate from this same strategic lineage.

The Shadow Over 9/11

The most controversial layer of Cheney’s legacy is tied to the events of September 11, 2001. At that moment Cheney effectively acted as the executive authority; Rumsfeld commanded the Pentagon; Neocon officials and affiliates held the key intelligence, defense, legislative, and media nodes of American power.

This concentration of authority continues to fuel questions that are widely known yet rarely spoken aloud in the United States.

The public memory of 9/11 is full of silences: Everyone knows who held the levers of power. No one discusses it openly.

Conclusion

The legacy of Cheney and Rumsfeld is not merely one of war and secrecy. It is the story of a political network that reshaped the world; the backlash that followed, and the fragmented America that remains.

And behind it all lies the question that the United States has collectively learned not to ask:

What really happened when the neocon project reached its peak - on the morning of September 11, 2001?

No official answer is likely to come. The silence has become part of the system itself.