Before the Country Buries the Truth With Him: The Real Legacy of Dick Cheney

Aaron’s Ride

When Aaron came home from our deployment to Afghanistan, he didn’t walk off that plane as the same man who boarded it a year earlier. You could see it in his shoulders. You could hear it in the long pauses between his words. You could feel it in the way he looked at the ground before he looked at anyone else. War doesn’t always leave visible scars, but it leaves marks all the same, and Aaron carried his in a way that made you wonder what it took to keep standing upright.

He wasn’t broken. He wasn’t fragile. He was changed. And he didn’t know what to do with that change. Most soldiers don’t.

He came home to Idaho the way so many of us did. People clapped in the airport. Strangers thanked him for his service. His family wrapped him in hugs that were equal parts relief and fear, because anyone who has ever waited for a soldier knows that the missing years aren’t just measured in miles. They are measured in all the things you can’t tell each other.

So he did what a lot of returning Guardsmen did at the time. He found something that made him feel free. He bought a motorcycle.

Not a flashy chrome monster or a machine built for speed. Just a bike that could take him out of his own head for a little while. Aaron rode that thing everywhere. Through the foothills. Across the desert stretches. Down the winding backroads where cell service drops out and time slows down. Those rides were his therapy. His escape. His quiet rebellion against the weight he carried.

He’d tell some of us, on the rare days he opened up, that the bike helped him get distance from Afghanistan. He didn’t complain about the war. He didn’t rant about politicians. He didn’t talk about strategy or policy or any of the debates people like to have on cable news. He talked about missing birthdays. Missing his kids. Missing the simple clarity of a life where he wasn’t supposed to make sense of missions that didn’t make sense to anyone.

He talked about the confusion that settled into a soldier’s bones when you risk your life for reasons you never fully understood. He talked about the guilt of being alive when others weren’t. And sometimes he talked about the silence that follows you home, the kind that fills a room even when you’re sitting next to the people you love.

One afternoon he got on that motorcycle like he had a hundred times before. Maybe he needed air. Maybe he needed quiet. Maybe he needed to feel like the world made sense for just one hour. He got on the bike. He rode out. And he never came back.

A driver took a turn too wide and too fast. Metal hit metal. Flesh hit pavement. And just like that, a man who survived Afghanistan couldn’t survive the road home.

His funeral wasn’t televised. No flags were lowered to half-staff. No former vice presidents gave solemn speeches about his service. No defense contractors sent flowers. No generals flew in for the day.

Just a windy afternoon at the Idaho Veterans Cemetery.

Just a few dozen people trying to make sense of a man who gave more than anyone would ever acknowledge.

Just the cold truth that some lives get remembered by the people who loved them, and other lives get remembered by a country that doesn’t deserve the sacrifice.

Aaron deserved more than silence.But silence is all the country gave him.

And the day Dick Cheney died, and I watched the United States lower its flags for a man whose decisions helped send Aaron into a war that bent him in ways he couldn’t unbend, something inside me snapped open. Not in anger. In obligation. A sense of duty that hit me in the chest like a sandbag.

Because if the country is willing to honor a man like Cheney while ignoring a man like Aaron, then we are telling the wrong story about who deserves our gratitude. And if we let that continue without pushing back, then we’re part of the lie.

Aaron rode to escape the questions war left behind.

I’m writing this so the country can’t escape them anymore.

The Country That Honors the Wrong Men

When the news broke that Dick Cheney had died, the reaction looked like something out of a State Department funeral manual. Flags dropped. Networks rolled out their somber music beds. Former presidents issued official statements praising his “service.” Senators talked about him as if he were some old statesman whose greatest achievement was wearing a tie for fifty years.

They treated him like a patriot. They treated him like a guardian of American safety. They treated him like a man who carried the burden of the toughest decisions with quiet honor.

And I watched all of it with a kind of stunned numbness, because I know what his decisions looked like from the other side. I know the faces of the men who carried the weight of those decisions. I know what it feels like to lose someone who died because powerful men in Washington believed their theories mattered more than the lives those theories cost.

Aaron never got a flag lowered.

But the man who helped send thousands like him into a war built on deception got a weeklong tribute across every major network in America.

That contrast is the story of the last twenty-five years. It’s the story younger Americans never got to learn. It’s the story the political class is hoping will fade with time.

Because the truth is simple. The country honors men like Cheney because power protects its own. And the country forgets men like Aaron because they never asked for anything except the chance to come home alive.

The Operator Behind the Curtain

Before America knew his name, before he became the face of a war that reshaped the world, Dick Cheney was something far simpler. He was an operator. A bureaucratic technician. A man who understood that the highest form of power in Washington isn’t held by those who give speeches. It’s held by those who decide what information gets to the people who give speeches.

He figured that out early. And once he did, he never let go of it.

He wasn’t charismatic. He wasn’t inspiring. He wasn’t a visionary. He was something more dangerous in the wrong moment. He was competent at the one thing that can tilt nations off their axis. He knew how to run a system.

At thirty-four he became Chief of Staff to a president who wasn’t elected to the presidency or the vice presidency. Gerald Ford needed someone who knew how to run the White House. Cheney stepped in and proved that a man with no charisma could control the flow of American power by controlling the flow of American information.

And that became the blueprint for his life.

He ran for Congress and then the House Republican Conference leadership. He became Secretary of Defense. He oversaw the first Gulf War. He watched the defense industry expand and consolidate. He left government and became CEO of Halliburton, a company that made its money by following American troops across the world.

Then he came back into government again.

And when he did, he brought all of that with him.

The access. The ideology. The relationships. The belief that war wasn’t just policy. War was infrastructure. War was influence. War was profitable.

He didn’t need crowds. He needed a crisis.

And then he got one.

The People Who Gave Him a Blueprint

Cheney didn’t invent the worldview that shaped the early 2000s. He found it waiting for him inside a think tank that most Americans had never heard of. A group of men who believed the United States had a destiny to dominate the world through force put their ideas on paper, sharpened their arguments, and waited for someone in power to carry their blueprint into the real world. That group was called the Project for a New American Century. PNAC.

If you were born after 1990, nobody ever taught you this part. They didn’t want you to know it. They didn’t want you to see the roots of the disaster you inherited. They didn’t want you to see that the Iraq War was not a spontaneous reaction to 9/11. It was a long-held ambition waiting for the right moment.

PNAC’s roster was a who’s who of the foreign policy establishment that dominated Republican politics for decades. Paul Wolfowitz. Richard Perle. Elliott Abrams. Scooter Libby. Zalmay Khalilzad. William Kristol. Robert Kagan. Men who wrote policy memos like they were war roadmaps. Men who believed America had a moral duty to overthrow hostile regimes, occupy strategic regions, and use military power to reshape the Middle East in America’s image.

They didn’t hide it, they printed it and they mailed it to policymakers. They lobbied for it in op-eds and speeches. They said Iraq should be invaded years before 9/11.

Their argument was simple, if America didn’t act aggressively, the world would slip out of its grasp.

There was only one problem. The American people didn’t agree. They didn’t want nation building. They didn’t want global policing. They didn’t want regime change. They didn’t want endless wars. They wanted peace at home and stability abroad.

PNAC knew the public would never support their vision unless something happened that would shatter the country’s sense of safety. And they said so openly in their 2000 report.

Their plan, they admitted, would be difficult to achieve “absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event like a new Pearl Harbor.”

Those words should haunt every American alive today. Not because they predicted tragedy. But because they revealed a cold truth.

They needed fear to achieve their vision. They needed national trauma to open the gates. And they needed a man willing to seize that moment when it came.

Cheney was that man.

He didn’t write their ideology, but he shared it. He didn’t build PNAC, but he believed in its blueprint. He wasn’t the architect of their vision, but he became its contractor, its executor, the man who would take their theory and pour it like concrete across the world.

When he joined the Bush campaign in 2000, he brought PNAC people with him. They filtered into the Defense Department, the National Security Council, the Vice President’s office. They took seats that had the authority to shape war plans, intelligence briefings, and diplomatic strategy.

Then the towers fell.

And everything they had written suddenly became actionable.

A Crisis Handed Him the Keys

September 11 did something more than devastate the country. It suspended the part of the American mind that asks questions before acting. It froze the public in shock long enough for men like Cheney to step into the vacuum and present themselves as the adults in the room.

He was calm. He was steady. He was decisive. That’s what Americans saw.

What they didn’t see was how quickly he moved to turn a national tragedy into a political opportunity. While the country was still choking on dust, Cheney’s team began pushing intelligence agencies to tie Iraq to the attacks. They did it before the fires at Ground Zero stopped burning. They did it while families were still searching for loved ones in the rubble. They did it while the country was too traumatized to question the motives of anyone who spoke with authority.

Cheney didn’t treat 9/11 as an attack that required justice. He treated it as the catalyzing event PNAC had said they needed.

He didn’t ask why it happened. He asked how far he could go with the power it gave him.

And from that moment on, he governed from a place outside the Constitution. Not because he said so, but because he acted as if the normal rules no longer applied.

He moved to expand executive power. He moved to centralize authority. He moved to bypass Congress. He moved to redefine the boundaries of intelligence. He moved to prepare the country for a war that had already been chosen long before the American people heard the first sales pitch.

The Machinery of a Lie

Here is the part younger readers need to understand, the Iraq War was not built on faulty intelligence…it was built on manipulated intelligence.

The difference matters.

Cheney didn’t wait for the intelligence community to give him facts that supported war. He pressured them to produce what he already believed. When they couldn’t do that, he created his own channels.

Inside the Pentagon, under Douglas Feith, the Office of Special Plans was set up as a shadow intelligence unit. It cherry-picked reports that career analysts rejected. It elevated rumor into certainty. It recycled claims that had already been debunked. It created connections between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda that the CIA, FBI, and foreign intelligence agencies all said were false.

But once those talking points reached Cheney’s office, they became gospel.

Curveball’s fabricated tales about mobile bioweapons labs became front-page news.

Forged documents about uranium from Niger became presidential talking points.

Aluminum tubes that nuclear experts dismissed were sold to the public as proof of a looming nuclear threat. A nonexistent meeting between Mohamed Atta and Iraqi intelligence became a key part of Cheney’s argument, long after every serious agency dismissed it outright.

He didn’t stumble into these lies. He repeated them confidently. He repeated them intentionally. He repeated them until fear drowned out doubt.

Every Sunday, he went on television and said things that weren’t true.

“We know where the weapons are.”

“We cannot wait for the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud.”

“Saddam has reconstituted his nuclear program.”

Fear was the message. Fear was the strategy. Fear was the glue that held the lie together.

Meanwhile Congress was cornered. Questioning the war was treated as weakness. Voting no was painted as unpatriotic. The press amplified fear instead of truth.

And in that climate, Cheney got exactly what he wanted, not a declaration of war, which the Constitution requires, instead he got something far more useful. He got an Authorization for Use of Military Force written so broadly, so vaguely, so carelessly that it gave the executive branch the power to wage war without ever going back to Congress.

The AUMF wasn’t oversight. It was abandonment.

A War That Was Already Underway

By the time Congress voted, the war was already happening behind the scenes.

Troops were staged in Kuwait, contracts were drafted, logistics were prepared.

Halliburton was positioned to receive billions in government work. Diplomacy was treated as theater and inspections were treated as obstacles.

Cheney didn’t wait for permission. He acted as if he already had it. And the moment the AUMF passed, even though it was not a declaration of war, he acted as if the Constitution had handed him everything he needed.

Then came the bombs.

Then came the invasion.

Then came the chaos that reshaped the world.

And men like Aaron found themselves fighting in a war that had been decided long before they were ever told why they were going.

The Collapse That Followed

Wars don’t end when the cameras move on. They echo.

What happened in Iraq wasn’t just mismanagement. It was catastrophe.

The American occupation dissolved the entire Iraqi military. Hundreds of thousands of trained fighters were left with no job, no income, and no place in the new order. Those men didn’t go home quietly. They became the backbone of the insurgency.

The purge known as de-Baathification gutted the civil service. Teachers, doctors, engineers, and administrators were banned from public life overnight. Schools closed. Hospitals faltered. Infrastructure collapsed.

And into that void entered something worse than the chaos that preceded it.

Extremist groups rushed into the vacuum. Al Qaeda in Iraq morphed into something far deadlier. They took ground. They recruited former officers. They exploited the destruction the occupation left behind.

That monster became ISIS. And ISIS became the justification for a whole new generation of interventions. All of it grew from decisions made by men who never had to walk the streets they destroyed.

The War That Came Home

The Iraq War didn’t just change the Middle East. It changed us.

It brought surveillance into every American life. It normalized warrantless wiretapping. It created secret courts that rubber-stamped government requests. It justified torture.

It militarized police departments. It rewrote the relationship between citizen and state.

It created a culture of secrecy where government power expanded behind closed doors.

And through all of it, Cheney remained unmoved.

He didn’t just bend the Constitution, he challenged its relevance. He acted as if the presidency was above law when the country was afraid.

And fear gave him cover.

The Fracture Inside the Republican Party

Before Iraq, the Republican Party had a tradition of cautious foreign policy. It believed in peace through strength. It believed war should be rare. It believed the Constitution meant something even in crisis.

Cheney shattered that tradition.

He split the party into two camps that still exist today; those who believed in endless intervention, and those who believed the country should take care of its own.

Veterans returned home and spoke the truth. Families questioned what they had sacrificed for. Libertarians warned about blowback. Grassroots conservatives demanded restraint.

And the old guard tried to pretend nothing had changed.

But everything had changed.

And the America First movement rose from the ruins of the neoconservative era that Cheney embodied.

The Human Cost That Will Outlive Us All

If you want to understand the real legacy of Dick Cheney, you cannot start with politics. You cannot start with the memos, or the intelligence briefings, or the Sunday talk shows. You have to start with the people who lived through the world his decisions created. You have to start with the families who still carry the burden of those choices. You have to start with the empty chairs at dinner tables and the folded flags on mantels in quiet homes across the country.

You have to start with the men and women who served under a promise that their sacrifice would mean something.

And the truth is this.

For too many of them, it didn’t.

Young Americans born after the year 2000 have no memory of the funerals that marked the early years of the Iraq War. They never saw the nightly casualty counts scroll across the bottom of the screen. They never heard the desperate pleas of families asking why their sons or daughters died in a place that had nothing to do with the attack that started the war. They never watched the interviews with soldiers who returned home missing limbs, missing friends, missing pieces of themselves.

They never saw how the country slowly stopped paying attention.

But the people who lived through it remember. They remember the caskets coming off the planes draped in American flags. They remember the small-town memorials. They remember the long deployments that turned months into years. They remember the marriages strained to the breaking point. They remember the mental health battles that started after the uniforms came off. They remember the anger of realizing the evidence that justified the war had been manipulated.

They remember men like Aaron. Men who carried their invisible wounds into civilian life. Men who didn’t make it home even after they made it home.

And they remember how Washington pretended not to notice.

The National Guard: A Citizen Army That Was Never Supposed to Be Used This Way

Perhaps the deepest wound left by the Cheney years sits inside the National Guard. Not because Guardsmen served. Not because they fought. But because they were used in a way that violated the very structure the Founders created.

The Guard is not a federal invasion force. It was never meant to be.

It is a state-based militia designed for emergencies at home.

Defense against invasions. Defense against lawlessness. Defense against insurrections. Community support during forest fires, floods, earthquakes, search and rescue.

And primarily, for homeland defense.

Not endless foreign wars. Not political adventures. Not missions justified by legal loopholes.

Yet the Cheney Doctrine used the National Guard as if it were the Pentagon’s private supply of extra bodies. It treated teachers, electricians, deputies, nurses, mechanics, and small-business owners as if they were disposable parts in a machine.

Entire units deployed again and again. Some went to Iraq. Some went to Afghanistan. Some went to both. And most deployed multiple times in fairly rapid succession.

They were sent overseas with equipment shortages. They were sent overseas with shortened training cycles. They were sent overseas because Congress refused to declare war but still wanted the manpower to fight one.

No one in Washington ever admitted how much they relied on the Guard to keep the Iraq War going long after the American public began to question it.

And when Guardsmen came back broken, when they came back injured, when they came back with wounds no one could see, Washington shrugged and moved on.

It was never their sons. It was never their daughters. It was never their families waiting by the phone. It was never their kids asking why dad or mom missed another Christmas.

That was the role handed to the National Guard.

And the Guard fulfilled it because that is what citizen soldiers do. They answer the call whether the call makes sense or not. They served honorably believing that they were protecting their country, their state, the fellow citizens, and their homes.

But the Founders never intended for that loyalty to be exploited. But the Founders DID anticipate war-hungry tyrants like Dick Cheney.

The Families That Never Stopped Serving

War is never confined to a battlefield. It spreads into kitchens and living rooms and school nights. It affects children who cannot understand why their parent is gone. It affects marriages that bend under the pressure. It affects careers, finances, mental health, and every part of a family’s life.

When Guardsmen were deployed, their families were deployed too. One into a combat zone. The other into the long, silent agony of waiting.

Spouses became single parents overnight. Kids became anxious and afraid. Parents and siblings carried fear the entire time a loved one was gone.

And all of it was done for a war rooted in deception, launched without a constitutional vote, and sustained by political arrogance.

This is the part of the story nobody mentions when they praise Cheney as a statesman. This is the part they bury. This is the part young Americans never learned.

The cost of the Iraq War is not forty-five hundred American deaths. The cost is every life affected by those deaths. The cost is every veteran who came home and couldn’t sleep. The cost is every Guard family that held their breath for a year. The cost is every spouse who held the home together alone. The cost is every child who learned what fear feels like before they learned multiplication.

The cost is people like Aaron.

The cost is the people he left behind, and the cost is those of us who knew him and still carry the weight.

The Moral Injury That Never Leaves

There is a kind of wound that doesn’t show up on brain scans or X-rays. It shows up in the quiet moments when a veteran is alone with his own thoughts. It shows up when you question whether the sacrifice meant anything. It shows up when you think about the friends who didn’t make it home. It shows up in the guilt of surviving a mission that no longer feels justified.

This moral injury is not a theory. It is real. It is pervasive. It is the invisible signature of the Iraq and Afghanistan era.

Veterans were sent into wars justified by lies. They fought because that is what American soldiers do. They did their job even when the mission didn’t make sense. They came home and tried to rebuild their lives.

Then they learned the truth.

They learned the intelligence was manipulated. They learned Congress never voted to declare war. They learned Cheney and his circle had been pushing Iraq long before 9/11. They learned the case for war was built backward, with the policy chosen first and the evidence manufactured later.

And that knowledge cuts deep. It breaks something inside you that once felt solid.

How do you reconcile the pride of your service with the knowledge that the people who sent you didn’t deserve your trust? How do you carry that while trying to build a life, raise a family, hold a job, and put on the face the world expects?

Some veterans manage to make peace with it. Some push it away. Some never find their footing again. And some, like Aaron, carry the confusion quietly until the road gives out beneath them.

The Suicide Crisis Nobody Invited Cameras To

More post-9/11 veterans have died by suicide than were killed in Iraq and Afghanistan combined. That sentence should bring this entire country to its knees.

These deaths are not random tragedies. They are casualties of policy decisions.

Every suicide is a ripple. Every ripple spreads across a family and a community. And each one is a reminder of something the political class never wants to confront.

They started wars without purpose. They prolonged them without honesty. They justified them with manipulation. They handed the consequences to families who had no seat at their decision-making table.

No cable news network lowers its music bed when a veteran dies by suicide.

No flag is lowered at the White House when a Guardsman takes his life.

No secretary or senator sends a staffer to sit with a grieving family.

The funerals are quiet. The grief is private. The toll is incalculable.

And yet there are people in Washington who want to treat Dick Cheney as a hero.

The Empty Chairs

If you want to know what the Iraq War cost, don’t look at statistics. Look at empty chairs.

The empty seat at a kitchen table where a father used to sit. The empty place in a bleacher where a mother would have watched her son play ball. The empty parking spot at a workplace where the crew still pauses out of habit. The empty aisle seat at a wedding where a sibling should have stood.

These empties linger and they last longer than headlines. They last longer than wars and they last longer than the lives of the men who created them.

I have seen these empty chairs. I have seen the families who sit around them. I have been to the funerals. I have carried the weight.

And I am telling you the truth: the people who praise Cheney today have never felt that weight. If they had, they would speak differently.

The Political Class Wants This Forgotten

Young Americans didn’t grow up with these funerals. They didn’t see the lies unfold in real time. They weren’t there for the shift from righteous anger after 9/11 to the creeping realization that Iraq had nothing to do with the attack.

They don’t know how early the push for Iraq began. They don’t know how aggressively dissent was silenced. They don’t know how easily the public was manipulated.

And the political class is counting on that.

They want the memory of the Iraq War to fade into something vague and softened.

They want Cheney to be remembered as a tough leader who made difficult choices.

They want history to treat him gently so the next generation is easier to persuade.

Because if the next generation forgets how this happened, then it can happen again. If they don’t know the price, they will accept the next sales pitch. If they don’t know what was lost, they will keep paying the bill.

This article is for them. For the people too young to remember. For the people who deserve a better inheritance than the one Cheney left behind. For the people who will be asked to fight the next war if we don’t stop the machinery he built.

The First Step Toward Ending the Cycle

If you want to stop another Cheney from rising, you don’t start in Washington. You start where the Founders started. You start with the people. You start with the states. You start with the one constitutional mechanism that has been sitting there for 250 years waiting for a generation with enough courage to use it.

War powers belong to Congress. Not the president. Not the Pentagon. Not a think tank. Not a vice president with a doctrine he never had to bleed for. Not a group of political operatives who see war as a tool for shaping the world instead of a last resort.

The Founders were deliberate when they gave Congress the power to declare war. They knew the executive branch would always be tempted by military action. They knew ambition leans toward force. They knew the human mind is too quick to imagine grand outcomes and too slow to consider the cost.

So they made sure the decision to wage war required the consent of the people’s representatives. And that safeguard held for nearly two centuries.

Until Vietnam. Until Korea. Until the Gulf of Tonkin. Until the Cold War era when presidents discovered loopholes. Until Congress decided it was easier to dodge responsibility than take a vote. Until Cheney realized that a scared nation would let him take the country anywhere he wanted.

Cheney didn’t break the Constitution…he exploited it. He exploited the loopholes left behind by decades of congressional cowardice. He exploited the public’s fear. He exploited the AUMF system until it became a blank check for endless war.

And the only movement in America that has decided to fix that loophole is Defend the Guard.

The Constitutional Lever Cheney Never Expected Anyone to Use

Defend the Guard is simple, so simple that people in Washington pretend not to understand it.

It says that no National Guard unit from any state can be deployed to a foreign war unless Congress declares war.

Not authorizes force.

Not passes a resolution.

Not issues a strongly worded letter.

A declaration.

The real thing. The one the Constitution requires. The one the Founders expected us to use. The one Congress has been running from for twenty years.

Defend the Guard doesn’t stop a legitimate war. It forces Congress to vote for it. It forces members of Congress to sign their names to the decision. It forces them to be accountable to the people who will lose their children if the war goes wrong.

Cheney never wanted that level of accountability. He needed ambiguity. He needed speed. He needed emotional momentum. He needed the ability to act without waiting for Congress to find its spine.

Defend the Guard would have stopped him. Not because it would have prevented the government from responding to 9/11. But because it would have prevented the Iraq War from being launched without a proper vote. It would have prevented the National Guard from being used as an endless supply of bodies for a mission the people never authorized.

And that is exactly why the old guard hates it. Because it takes power away from Washington and returns it to the one place they cannot control.

The states.

The Founders Left Us a Map Out of This Mess

People like to talk about the Founders as if they were marble statues instead of flesh and blood men who understood tyranny because they lived under one. They didn’t trust the presidency. They didn’t trust centralized power. They didn’t trust the idea that one man could decide the fate of millions.

So they limited the executive and they empowered the legislature. They created federalism.

They gave the states their own militias. They made sure Congress had to vote before a war could begin.

And for most of American history, that system worked.

Congress declared war in 1812.

Congress declared war in 1846.

Congress declared war in 1898.

Congress declared war in 1917.

Congress declared war in 1941.

Five times. Five votes. Five clear statements of national will.

And every one of those decisions carried legitimacy because the people’s representatives took responsibility for them.

Since the World War II, Congress has not declared war a single time. Not once.

Not in Korea.

Not in Vietnam.

Not in the Persian Gulf.

Not in Iraq.

Not in Afghanistan.

Not in Syria, Yemen, Libya, Somalia, Pakistan, or any of the other countries where American troops have fought in the shadows.

This is not a small oversight. It is a fundamental breakdown of the constitutional order.

Cheney did not create that breakdown. He accelerated it. He perfected it. He weaponized it. He wrapped it in fear and secrecy and the language of strength until Congress became an accessory to its own irrelevance.

Defend the Guard is the first serious attempt in a generation to reverse that trend.

Why the States Must Lead

Washington will not fix itself. No empire in history has ever reined itself in voluntarily. No ruling class has ever surrendered power because it was the right thing to do. And no Congress has ever reclaimed authority without pressure from outside the Beltway.

That is why Defend the Guard starts at the state level. Because the states were always meant to be the pressure points. Because the National Guard belongs to the governors unless Congress declares war. Because the Constitution gives the states leverage over federal power when federal power exceeds its boundaries.

And that leverage is exactly what Dick Cheney spent his career trying to neutralize.

He needed the Guard and he exploited the Guard. He relied on the Guard to sustain the Iraq and Afghanistan wars long after the active-duty force was stretched thin.

States like Idaho, Montana, Arizona, Tennessee, and New Hampshire now stand at the front of a fight that could change the direction of American foreign policy. Not by screaming at Washington. Not by begging Congress to act. But by using the authority the Constitution already gave them.

If a single state passes Defend the Guard, it will trigger a national reckoning.

If ten states pass it, the Iraq model becomes impossible to repeat.

If twenty states pass it, Congress will have no choice but to reclaim the war powers it abandoned.

This is the lever. This is the pressure point. This is the battlefield that will decide whether the next generation inherits a republic or the tattered remains of an exhausted empire.

The Empire That Cannot Admit Itself

No one in Washington wants to say this out loud, but America has drifted into a pattern that every empire in history followed before it fell.

We fight too many wars and we maintain too many bases around the world. We spend too much money we don’t have and we send the working class to die while the ruling class writes essays about grand strategy. We confuse military action with national strength. We pretend the Constitution is a suggestion instead of a restraint. We chase enemies in every corner of the globe and wonder why our own country feels less safe.

Empires always believe they are exceptional right up to the moment they crumble.

And the politicians who cheerlead empire building never bear the consequences of its collapse.

Dick Cheney operated like a man who believed the rules did not apply to him. He acted like the United States could do anything, anywhere, at any time. He used fear to justify aggression. He used secrecy to avoid accountability. He used the language of patriotism to sell deception. And he left behind a system that will outlive him unless we break it.

That system is not a legacy to be celebrated. It is a warning label. It is a case study in how republics become empires and how empires become ghosts.

The Last Chance to Draw the Line

We do not get infinite chances to fix this. The next major crisis will test every flaw in the system Cheney created. If we do nothing, we will repeat every mistake he made. If we stay silent, we will send another generation into wars built on half truths and political ambition.

If we bury the truth with Cheney, we give the next Cheney permission to rise.

This is the moment, this is the line, this is the fight.

Defend the Guard is not just policy. It is a choice between two futures.

One future is a republic where Congress debates war openly, votes honestly, and sends American troops into battle only when the nation itself accepts the burden.

The other future is the one Cheney left us.

Endless conflict. Unaccountable power. A political class that hides behind secrecy while families like Aaron’s bury the cost.

We cannot allow that future to be the one our children inherit.

The Final Truth Washington Hoped You Would Never Say Out Loud

The country lowered its flags for Dick Cheney. It never lowered them for Aaron. It never lowered them for the Guardsmen who carried the weight of a war built on deception. It never lowered them for the families who live with the fallout.

If the country must choose who it remembers, let it remember the men who served with honor instead of the men who used that honor for their own ambitions.

If this article does nothing else, let it teach younger Americans the truth the political class is trying to bury with Cheney:

He was not a statesman.

He was not a guardian of American strength.

He was not a symbol of steady leadership.

He was the architect of a catastrophe.

And he left behind a system that will destroy us if we do not stop it.

The first step in stopping it is simple.

Visit DefendTheGuard.us and add your name. Chip in a few dollars if you can. Stand with the movement that is finally saying out loud what too many people still whisper.

Help us confront the last surviving shadow of Cheney’s doctrine and restore the constitutional order he spent a lifetime undermining.

Do it for the republic. Do it for the next generation. Do it for the men and women who served without ever asking for anything in return.

Do it for Aaron.

Because if this country is going to lower its flags, it should lower them for men like him.

Before the Country Buries the Truth With Him: The Real Legacy of Dick Cheney.

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