Dick Cheney, America's most powerful modern vice president and chief architect of the "war on terror", who helped lead the country into the ill-fated Iraq war on faulty assumptions, has died, according to a statement from his family. He was 84.

The 46th vice president, who served alongside Republican President George W Bush for two terms between 2001 and 2009, was for decades a towering and polarising Washington power player.

In his final years, however, Cheney, still a hardline conservative, nevertheless became largely ostracised from his party over his intense criticism of President Donald Trump whom he branded a "coward" and the greatest-ever threat to the republic.

In an ironic coda to a storied political career, he cast his final vote in a presidential election in 2024 for a

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