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Elizabeth Cheney, the daughter of Dick Cheney, is an outspoken and controversial proponent of hardline U.S. foreign and domestic policies on the “war on terror.” During the George W. Bush presidency, Cheney worked in the State Department overseeing Middle East policy. After the election of Barack Obama, she became a standard-bearer for the militarist agenda pursued by her father during the Bush years, founding a right-wing lobbying group called Keep America Safe and serving as a go-to pundit on conservative media outlets like Fox News.

Shortly after it began operations in late 2009, Keep America Safe, which Cheney cofounded with the Weekly Standard’s William Kristol and support from conservative donors like Melvin Sembler, became a lightening rod for controversy. In February 2010, the group released a video that questioned the loyalty of Justice Department lawyers who had defended terrorism suspects. Defending the video, Michael Goldfarb, an adviser to the group, recklessly claimed that the lawyers targeted in the ad “have propagandized on behalf of our enemies, engaging in a worldwide smear campaign against the CIA, the U.S. military and the United States itself while we are at war.”[1]

The video was roundly criticized by conservatives and liberals. A group of conservative lawyers issued a letter stating that “such attacks” were undermining the judicial system. “Whether one believes in trial by military commission or in federal court, detainees will have access to counsel. … To delegitimize the role detainee counsel play is to demand adjudications and policymaking stripped of a full record. Whatever systems America develops to handle difficult detention questions will rely, at least some of the time, on an aggressive defense bar; those who take up that function do a service to the system.”[2]

While at the State Department, Cheney oversaw efforts to develop regime-change strategies in places like Syria and Iran, efforts closely in line with the “war on terror” agenda developed by neoconservatives at places like the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) and vigorously pursued by Cheney’s father and his aides in the Office of the Vice President.

Cheney and her father’s similar ideological sympathies made headlines in January 2009 when a writer for Slate.com discovered Elizabeth’s 1988 senior thesis at the library of Colorado College. Titled the “Evolution of Presidential War Powers,” Cheney’s thesis, according to writer Zac Frank, argued that “constitutionally and historically, presidents have virtually unchecked powers in war.” Adds Frank, “Thirteen years before her father became vice president, she had symbolically authored the first legal memorandum of the Bush administration, laying out the same arguments that would eventually justify Guantanamo and extraordinary rendition, wiretapping of American citizens, and, broadly, the unitary theory of the executive that shaped the Bush presidency.”[3]

From 2005 to early 2006, Cheney served as principal deputy assistant secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs, making her No. 2 in the State Department's Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs. The post, which she left in spring 2006 to have her fifth child, reportedly entailed actively working to develop regime-change strategies for Middle Eastern countries, mainly Syria and Iran. According to unnamed colleagues interviewed by the newspaper The Australian, within the department, she was called the "freedom agenda coordinator" or "democracy tsar.”[4]

The job was Elizabeth Cheney's second in the Bush State Department. From 2002 to 2003, she served as a deputy assistant secretary, a post she left to aid her father's vice presidential reelection campaign. Her earlier tenure, although a matter of concern among critics who regarded her as a spy within Colin Powell's State Department, ended with little fanfare. According to Todd Purdum of the New York Times, "After two years of working on projects to promote women's rights and democracy in the Arab world, she won praise from skeptical foreign service officers, the European press, Arab leaders, and prominent Democrats."[5]

Not everyone, however, was pleased with Cheney's work. Larry Wilkerson, Colin Powell's assistant at State, told the American Prospect that she clashed with ambassadors while visiting the Middle East: "Liz Cheney comes out to this country, and she tells the ambassador—and she doesn't outrank him—she tells the ambassador, 'You're not going in the meeting with me.' And he says, 'I'm sorry, I'm going in the meeting with you. You're not going into a meeting with the head of State without me.' And she says, 'Nope—would you like a telephone call?'"[6]

Cheney’s return to State in 2005 fueled speculation that she was pushing plans to intervene in Iran and Syria. Journalist Robert Dreyfuss wrote, "During the past 15 months, Elizabeth Cheney has met with and bolstered a gaggle of Syrian exiles, often in tandem with John Hannah and David Wurmser, top officials in the Office of the Vice President; has pressed hard for money to accelerate the administration's ever-more overt campaign for forced regime change in both Damascus and Tehran; and has overseen an increasingly discredited push for American-inspired democratic reform from Morocco to Iran."[7]

Observers also connected Cheney with two obscure offices in the State Department that were the focus of concerns in early 2006 about the Bush administration's plans for the Middle East. On April 22, 2006, the Financial Times reported on the creation of an "Iran-Syria Operations Group" (ISOG) that purportedly reported to Cheney. Adam Ereli, a State Department spokesman, denied the group existed. However, other unnamed sources, including U.S. government officials and a European diplomat, assured the Financial Times that the group had in fact been established. These sources said that the group served as an interagency effort that "is supposed to coordinate with the Pentagon and other departments.”[8]

The New York Times reported that the State Department requested $85 million for a Liz Cheney-run program "for scholarships, exchange programs, radio and television broadcasts, and other activities aimed at shaking up Iran's political system." But observers were skeptical about the program's impact. Said Vali Nasr, an Iranian-born professor at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, Calif.: "It sounds good to fund civil society groups, but not when you don't know who the groups are. No real group wants a direct affiliation with the United States. It will just get them into trouble with the government."[9]

Cheney's "unpublicized" meetings with Syrian dissidents in early 2005 also spurred speculation that the administration was repeating the strategy it followed with former Iraqi exile leader Ahmed Chalabi, who helped feed misleading information to the United States about Saddam Hussein's weapons programs. The meetings were first reported in the Saudi-owned Asharq Al-Awsat newspaper, which claimed to have received confirmation of them from the State Department. According to an Agence France Presse account, Cheney, Hannah and several Pentagon and National Security Council officials met with the dissidents to "discuss ways of 'weakening the Syrian regime.'"[10]

Among those participating on the Syrian side was Farid Ghadry, a U.S.-based businessman who headed the Reform Party of Syria. According to Robert Dreyfuss, Ghadry is "a pro-Israeli Syrian who's maintained ties to neoconservatives in Washington and who is close to [David] Wurmser and his wife, Meyrav Wurmser, the director of Middle East affairs for the Hudson Institute."[11]

Mourhaf Jouejati, a Syria specialist at George Washington University, called Ghadry a "mini-me of Ahmed Chalabi."[12] Jouejati also claimed that Liz Cheney, Hannah, and the Wurmsers "are the backbone for Farid Ghadry's movement. The question is, are they just seeking leverage with Syria, or is it a serious option? If it is the latter, I would be scared, because that means that they don't know what they are doing."[13] According to Dreyfuss, Ghadry's connections to this network may have resulted from his membership at the American Israel Public Affairs Committee and participation in meetings of the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs, a neoconservative-driven outfit that aims to tighten military relations between the United States and Israel.[14]

After leaving office in 2006, Cheney remained a vocal proponent of Bush foreign policies. In early 2007, shortly after Dick Cheney publicly accused House Speaker Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) of "bad behavior" for visiting Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, the Washington Post ran an op-ed in which Liz Cheney argued that "conducting diplomacy with the regime in Damascus while they kill Lebanese democrats is not only irresponsible, it is shameful." She added: "Talking to the Syrians emboldens and rewards them at the expense of America and our allies in the Middle East. It hasn't and won't change their behavior. They are an outlaw regime and should be isolated."[15]

According to the Inter Press Service (IPS), Cheney's op-ed "evoked considerable speculation [in Washington] ... [about] the balance between hawks led by the vice president and Deputy National Security Advisor Elliott Abrams, on the one hand, and 'realists' led by the State Department, on the other …"[16] Wayne White, a former top State Department Middle East analyst and adjunct scholar at the Middle East Institute, told IPS: "This could be a desperate attempt to reverse a trend that is going against [the hardliners]." Another observer, retired Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, former chief of staff under former Secretary of State Powell, told reporter Jim Lobe: "She's doing Daddy's business. It's what Powell used to say about Bush: he's got these rough edges, and Cheney knows how to rub them."[17]

Earlier, in January 2007, Cheney wrote a sharply worded op-ed in the Post titled "Retreat Isn't an Option." The piece, which came on the heels of President Bush's controversial decision to boost troop levels in Iraq and threaten military action against Iraq's neighbors, implicitly attacked the U.S. public for weakness on the war on terror. "American troops will win if we show even one-tenth the courage here at home that they show every day on the battlefield," wrote Cheney. "And by the way, you cannot wish failure on our soldiers' mission and claim, at the same time, to be supporting the troops. It just doesn't compute.”

Cheney reserved much of her invective for then-Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-NY), whom she argued was proving as weak-willed on Iraq as her male counterparts in Congress: "In 2007, a woman can run for president and show the same level of courage and conviction about this war many of her male colleagues have. Steel in the spine? Not so much."[18]

The op-ed also revealed Cheney's mastery of what one commentator terms the neoconservatives' trademark "combination of overstatement and ancestor-worship.”[19] Citing the World War II-era victory rhetoric of adopted neocon deity Winston Churchill, Cheney argued that "America faces an existential threat ... We will have to fight these terrorists to the death somewhere, sometime. We can't negotiate with them or 'solve' their jihad. If we quit in Iraq now, we must get ready for a harder, longer, more deadly struggle later." She then concluded: "America deserves better. It's time for everyone—Republicans and Democrats—to stop trying to find ways for America to quit. Victory is the only option. We must have the fortitude and the courage to do what it takes. In the words of Winston Churchill, we must deserve victory. We must be in it to win."[20]

Cheney's husband, Philip Perry, served as general counsel to the Department of Homeland Security during the Bush presidency.

Please note: IPS Right Web neither represents nor endorses any of the individuals or groups profiled on this site.