AI Is A Gateway To The Welfare State
October 6, 2026 |
Keith Giles
“We will be greeted as liberators.” — Dick Cheney, 2003
Few American leaders have left a shadow as long—or as contested—as recently deceased former Vice President Dick Cheney. To understand his legacy, we have to confront two intertwined truths: the human cost of the Iraq War and the moral contradictions of a man who helped demonize gay marriage while raising a gay daughter he claimed to love.
We also must be cognizant that he and his wife Lynne were long associated with United Methodist congregations and identified as Christians. Thus, Cheney’s legacy must be inexorably tied to the Christian Nationalists of the Republican Party today.
As Vice President under George W. Bush, Cheney was one of the principal architects of the 2003 invasion of Iraq. He championed intelligence that later proved false, insisting there was “no doubt” Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction. He predicted the U.S. military would be “greeted as liberators.” Neither claim proved true.
According to the U.S. Department of Defense, 4,419 American service members were killed and nearly 32,000 were wounded in Iraq. The human toll for Iraqis was exponentially higher. Independent tallies from the Iraq Body Count Project estimate over 180,000 documented civilian deaths, while studies published in The Lancet and PLOS Medicine suggest hundreds of thousands of excess deaths, many caused indirectly by the chaos unleashed after the invasion.
Cheney’s defenders still argue that toppling Saddam Hussein was necessary to secure U.S. interests. But the belief that America was allowed to make such decisions in our own interests has always carried a cost. The Iraq war destabilized an entire region, gave rise to ISIS, and eroded America’s moral credibility in the region for another generation.
Before becoming Vice President, Cheney served as CEO of Halliburton, one of the world’s largest oil-field service companies. During the Iraq War, Halliburton—and its subsidiary, Kellogg Brown & Root (KBR)—secured billions of dollars in U.S. government contracts for logistical and reconstruction work in Iraq.
That overlap raised obvious questions: Did Cheney personally profit from the war he helped start?
The facts are complicated. Cheney received about $398,000 in deferred compensation from Halliburton while in office—payments earned before he became Vice President. He also retained Halliburton stock options, though he placed them in a charity trust designed to avoid direct personal gain. Nonpartisan watchdogs like FactCheck.org concluded that his deferred pay “wouldn’t increase no matter how much money the company makes.”
Still, the optics were damning. Halliburton’s profits soared as U.S. troops fought and died, and Cheney—who had championed the invasion—remained one of the most powerful figures in Washington. Whether or not he personally enriched himself, the perception of conflict of interest became part of his enduring stain.
Cheney’s public stance on same-sex marriage also reveals the contradictions of Christianity tied to power. His daughter Mary Cheney is openly gay and married her partner in 2012. During the 2004 re-election campaign, Cheney told voters that “freedom means freedom for everyone,” signaling quiet support for marriage equality.
Yet his administration simultaneously backed a proposed constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage. The amendment was placed on the ballot by another self-identified Christian – Karl Rove – specifically for the purpose of turning out the evangelical vote. Cheney did not oppose the idea privately nor the measure publicly, later saying, “The President makes policy for the administration.”
The Bible says, “I wish that you were hot or cold, but because you are lukewarm, I will spit you out of my mouth.” MLK said, “I’m most surprised by the white moderate, who is a bigger obstacle to justice than the Klanner…” Jesus, when offered governmental power – refused it as the antithesis of his mission.
In private life, Cheney affirmed his daughter and later called same-sex marriage “a state issue,” but his silence when it mattered most spoke volumes. His family itself became a political battleground when his other daughter, Liz Cheney, opposed marriage equality during a Senate campaign—prompting Mary to accuse her of treating her family as “second-class citizens.”
Oh, how malleable the morals of the Christian in pursuit of power.
Cheney’s story is ultimately about power without reflection. He reshaped the vice presidency into an arm of executive authority, drove the U.S. into a catastrophic war on faulty (if not fabricated) intelligence, and stood largely unmoved by the suffering that followed.
And yet, within his own family, he faced the same moral choice millions of Americans confronted in that era: whether love could coexist with ideology. Like so much of his political life, and the lives of politically manipulated Christians, his answer fell short of What Jesus Would Do.
These are not abstractions. They are the human arithmetic of policy decisions—lives altered and ended because a few powerful men believed they could remake a region by force.
Dick Cheney’s legacy is one of structural power (he reshaped the vice presidency, he influenced war-making and executive branch expansion) and controversy (the human cost of the Iraq War, the flawed intelligence, the limited accountability). On the LGBTQ+ front, he occupies a complicated space as an opponent rather than an ally or activist.
If Cheney’s legacy teaches us anything, it’s that moral clarity must precede political power. The cost of ignoring that truth can be measured not only in lives lost, but in the conscience of a nation still haunted by the path Cheney helped forge.
Jesus said of Dick Cheney and others in a politicized religion: “Judgment day will be better for Sodom than for you.”
