By Aayesha J Soni
Here is the truth we prefer to bury with powerful men: some lives end before their consequences do. With the death of former U.S. vice-president Dick Cheney at 84, the architect of the post-9/11 “war on terror” leaves a world still living inside the blast radius of his decisions. Tributes will describe his resolve and “clarity.” History should remember the human beings who paid for it- with their bodies, their futures, and their countries. Cheney did not simply influence policy; he midwifed invasions, torture regimes, and a theory of limitless executive power. And to the very end, he expressed no remorse.
Start with Iraq, where the euphemism of “regime change” became a nation’s slow asphyxiation. Credible estimates of war-related deaths vary, but even conservative counts are staggering: the Iraq Body Count project documents roughly 187,000–211,000 civilian deaths from violence alone, with wider tallies of total violent deaths (including combatants) approaching 300,000. Other scientific surveys, The Lancet and PLOS Medicine, place total excess deaths and direct/indirect fatalities in the hundreds of thousands. These are not abstractions; they are children, teachers, drivers, surgeons, neighbors- erased. Afghanistan, sold as the “good war,” became a 20-year conveyor belt of funerals. The Costs of War project estimates tens of thousands of civilians killed directly by violence and suggests total deaths- including indirect deaths from hunger, disease, and destroyed infrastructure- are far higher; UNAMA’s annual reports repeatedly logged catastrophic civilian harm. Long before Western capitals tired of their war, Afghans were already living with its permanent aftershocks.
What makes Cheney singular is not only the scale of the wreckage- it is the brazenness of his moral certainty while standing atop it. He defended waterboarding and other “enhanced interrogation” techniques, acts the rest of us call torture, famously saying he would “do it again in a minute.” He dismissed the Senate’s torture report and brushed aside wrongful detentions as tolerable collateral to his vision of security. On the Iraq invasion itself, he repeatedly said he had no regrets. This is not contrition; it is an ethic of ends without limits. Here is the other obscenity: there was no legal retribution. No arraignment in The Hague. No courtroom reckoning for a war justified by discredited claims, nor for a torture architecture laundered through lawyerly memos and euphemisms. In American public life, “controversial” is often the soft grave where accountability goes to die. Cheney’s story is a manual for how elite impunity works: redefine the crime, outsource the cruelty, classify the evidence, and wait the outrage out. When death finally arrives, it is the obituary that decides the tone.
But this is not just about one man. Power reproduces itself through precedent. Today, another leader stands in the same moral dock- not by our rhetoric, but by international law. The International Criminal Court has issued arrest warrants for Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, alleging responsibility for crimes including the war crime of starvation as a method of warfare and crimes against humanity in Gaza. Israel disputes the court’s jurisdiction; the warrants stand. That a Western-backed leader is named at all is a break in the habit of looking away. It should not be an exception. Look at the record the warrants live inside. Since October 2023, Gaza has been reduced from a beleaguered strip to a ledger of mass casualty figures: by October 3, 2025, over 67,000 killed and 169,000 injured, according to tallies cited by Brown University’s Costs of War project- more than 10% of the population directly killed or wounded. UN agencies and humanitarian groups have documented destruction of health infrastructure, displacement on a biblical scale, and deliberate policies, like the throttling of food and fuel, that move beyond the fog of war into the clarity of collective punishment. This is not security; it is a strategy of breaking a people. Cheney’s life is a mirror we should hold up to our present, not a curtain we draw over our past. The logic that made torture “legal” and preventive war “defensive” is the same logic that now makes the starvation of civilians an “unfortunate necessity,” the destruction of hospitals a “tragic mistake,” and the flattening of entire neighborhoods “proportionate.” When states learn that the worst that follows catastrophic decisions is a reputational debate and a generous book contract, the lesson is simple: do it again. The only deterrent power respects is consequence.
So what would accountability look like- beyond headlines? First, it requires naming the dead with the same energy with which we elevate the powerful. It requires incorporating civilian death, displacement, and the long arc of disease and deprivation into our public calculus of “success.” It requires domestic legislatures to claw back authorities ceded to executives during panic years. And it demands that international law apply equally—to the enemies we loathe and the allies we arm. Otherwise, law is nothing more than an accent we put on our interests. The easy response to Cheney’s death is to debate whether he was a patriot or a villain. The honest response is to ask how many future Cheneys we are incubating by our unwillingness to hold anyone truly to account. If the authors of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars leave this world without facing a judge, and if leaders who preside over Gaza’s pulverization can tour Western capitals unmolested, the message to the next generation of decision-makers is deafening: history is a better sanctuary than justice.
Cheney is gone. The people whose names never made the news remain gone with him. Honor demands more than solemn words; it demands consequences- for those who invaded on a lie, for those who tortured without shame, and for those who today starve and bomb with impunity. If the ICC’s warrants against Netanyahu and Gallant hold, it will mark one step away from the moral abyss we normalized after 9/11. If they do not, we will have learned nothing from the century’s darkest chapters, only rehearsed them for the next war- another country, another generation of children, the same obituary.
Aayesha J Soni is a neurologist/epileptologist working in South Africa and medical volunteer with the Gift of the Givers organization.