DICK CHENEY’S name will be forever associated with one of the greatest crimes of the 20th century — the US-British invasion and occupation of Iraq.

That fact would not in the slightest bit perturb the former US vice-president, an unrepentant imperialist who died this week, aged 84.

He was perhaps the most powerful holder of the vice-presidential office in living memory, assuming virtual direction of US foreign and military strategy in the wake of the September 11 2001 terror attacks.

His nominal boss, president George W Bush, seemed content to give Cheney and defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld unlimited latitude to pursue a policy of global aggression and violation of basic rights.

It was a role to which Cheney, a career-long hard-line conservative, was well-suited. While many in the Bush administration styled themselves neoconservatives, dressing up US wars and interventions as being in pursuit of democracy and human rights, Cheney had one object only — enhancing the global power of US capital.

To that end he seized on the panicked post-September 11 political atmosphere to pursue “America First” policies which foreshadowed those of Donald Trump a generation later.

He approved the use of torture against suspects in US detention, and gave the green light for the CIA to run its extraordinary rendition programme, shipping people around the world to be interrogated in secret locations free of scrutiny — a programme in which the British government was likely complicit.

Cheney’s last hurrah in office was successfully pushing for a US troop “surge” in Iraq in 2007, to try to save the floundering occupation of a country by then engulfed in both a resistance struggle and a sectarian civil war.

He carried his point — at the expense of thousands more lost lives — but by then his popularity was waning, as the occupation increasingly discredited Bush, who had been forced by political pressure to sack Rumsfeld.

Indifferent to civil rights and international law, Cheney saw little advantage in cultivating US allies, preferring for the then-sole superpower to go it alone. He did find room in his memoirs, however, to express his appreciation for Labour prime minister Tony Blair.

Dick Cheney was born in Nebraska in 1941, before his family — his father was an employee of the agriculture department — moved to Wyoming, where he was based for the rest of his life.

Like a number of US warhawks of his generation, including Trump, he avoided service in the Vietnam war, saying that he had other priorities.

This did nothing to impede his ascent in Republican politics, serving as White House chief of staff under president Gerald Ford.

After Ford’s defeat, he returned to Wyoming and won the conservative, rural state’s sole seat in the House of Representatives.

Cheney established an unblemished reactionary record in Congress, opposing environmental protection, gun control and sanctions on apartheid South Africa, while backing increased military spending.

When the older George Bush won the presidency in 1988, he appointed Cheney secretary of defence, from which perch he directed the first Gulf war of 1991, a conflict which marked the start of the “unilateral moment” of unchallengeable US military power, as the Soviet Union collapsed.

Out of office once more when Bill Clinton won the White House, Cheney went off to make some money, becoming chief executive of the energy and infrastructure monopoly Halliburton.

This proved to be a sound investment for the company, as it reaped lucrative contracts for “rebuilding” Iraq once its former boss had first reduced it to ruins.

The younger George Bush named Cheney his running mate in 2000, largely to balance out his own inexperience and, indeed, apparent stupidity. After the Supreme Court controversially handed victory in the extremely tight presidential election to Bush, Cheney was back in Washington, more powerful than ever.

When the al-Qaida attacks hit the US a few months later, a seemingly overwhelmed Bush was bundled off onto an aircraft while Cheney, operating from an “undisclosed location” seized control of the US government response.

He later said he would have been perfectly willing to shoot down the fourth hijacked passenger airline — believed to be heading for the US Congress, had it not crashed after passengers grappled with the hijackers — on September 11.

Thus began the “war on terror” which spread from Afghanistan to Iraq and beyond, costing hundreds of thousands of lives and violating the rights and sovereignty of countless individuals and countries around the world.

Cheney and his staff of zealots peddled the lies that Saddam Hussein’s Iraq was producing weapons of mass destruction, and even collaborating with al-Qaida. The subsequent war was his endeavour as much as Bush and Blair’s and the blood of masses is therefore on his hands.

He was indifferent to United Nations approval for the contemplated aggression against Iraq, a long-standing objective of the US right and centre, which he saw as key to remaking the Middle East under US domination.

While Saddam was speedily defeated by the Anglo-US invaders the wheels started to come off Cheney’s strategy thereafter, when it became clear that there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, and that the people did not greet the invaders as “liberators,” as anticipated, but as imperialist occupiers.

Nevertheless, Cheney doubled down on his plans, brushing aside international agreements prohibiting torture and embarking on an unprecedented programme of spying on US citizens themselves, while settling in to a bloody occupation facing a mounting insurgency in Iraq.

His advocacy of the “surge” was designed to postpone the ignominious defeat staring the mightiest military in the world in the face.

Again foreshadowing Trump, he was an unabashed champion of the power of the imperial presidency, who revelled in his sinister and forbidding public image.

After he and Bush left office, with president Barack Obama owing his election at least in part to revulsion at the Iraq war, Cheney’s political influence faded.

The Cheney name lived on, however, with his daughter Liz rising to become the third-ranking Republican in the House of Representatives, having inherited her father’s old seat.

Liz Cheney was as conservative in her views as her father, but in a surprising turn became strongly critical of Trump playing fast and loose with the US constitution, particularly after the storming of the Capitol by his supporters in January 2020.

She helped lead the congressional probe into the episode, earning her the undying enmity of most of the Trumpified Republican party. As a result she lost the Republican primary for her seat in Congress.

In her preference for the constitution over the Maga movement, she had the support of her father, who attacked Trump as a threat to democracy and the rule of law in the US.

Cheney’s last vote in a presidential election was thus cast for Democrat Kamala Harris, an event which nothing in his career could have anticipated, although probably little in Harris’s foreign policy would have unduly disturbed him.

Perhaps the ghoulish war criminal hoped for redemption, or at least a little lightening in a political life painted in the darkest colours.