Former United States Vice President Dick Cheney has died at the age of 84.
Cheney, who served under President George W. Bush from 2001 to 2009, was widely regarded as the most influential vice president in US history.
He was a key architect of the Iraq war, a conflict launched on claims that Saddam Hussein’s regime possessed weapons of mass destruction, claims that were later proven false.
In the months leading up to the 2003 invasion, Cheney repeatedly asserted that Iraq had chemical and biological weapons and close links to al-Qaeda.
“There is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction,” he said in August 2002.
Subsequent investigations by the United Nations and US intelligence agencies found no evidence of active weapons programmes or links to the September 11 attacks.
Critics accused Cheney of overstating intelligence to build public and political support for war, an intervention that resulted in hundreds of thousands of deaths and long-term instability across the Middle East.
Before becoming vice president, Cheney served as US Secretary of Defense under President George H. W. Bush and later as chief executive of the energy and military contractor Halliburton.
His ties to the company became a focus of controversy during the Iraq war when Halliburton and its subsidiary, Kellogg Brown & Root, received billions of dollars in government contracts for reconstruction and logistics in Iraq.
Many of those contracts were awarded without competitive bidding, prompting allegations of conflicts of interest and war profiteering.
Cheney maintained that he had no role in the awarding of contracts and had divested his financial interests in the company before taking office.
Following his years in government, Cheney continued to defend the administration’s actions in Iraq, arguing that removing Saddam Hussein was necessary to protect the United States.
However, historians and former intelligence officials have since described the invasion as one of the most consequential foreign policy failures in recent history.
Cheney died from complications of pneumonia and underlying heart disease, according to his family.
