Getbig Bodybuilding, Figure and Fitness Forums
Getbig Main Boards => Politics and Political Issues Board => Topic started by: BayGBM on June 18, 2014, 04:49:15 PM
-
Maybe listening to Dick Cheney on Iraq isn’t a good idea
by PAUL WALDMAN June 18 at 12:35 PM
Today, on the Senate floor, Harry Reid said: “Being on the wrong side of Dick Cheney is being on the right side of history.”
Reid was responding to Cheney’s op-ed in the Wall Street Journal with his daughter Liz attacking the Obama administration’s policies in the Middle East and elsewhere, a piece that has already generated much discussion. The Cheneys have also formed an organization, the Alliance for a Strong America, to advocate Cheneyite policies (you can tell it’ll be strong and resolute, because in the announcement video, Dick is wearing a cowboy hat).
The Cheneys’ op ed and new organization capture a key facet of conservatives’ approach to the foreign policies of the Obama era: They ply their ideas from a strange place where history started in January 2009.
The Cheneys offer no discussion of the disastrous decision to invade Iraq in the first place (though they still surely believe the war was a great idea, they apparently realize most Americans don’t agree). But anything that happened afterward can only be Obama’s fault. They write, “Mr. Obama had only to negotiate an agreement to leave behind some residual American forces, training and intelligence capabilities to help secure the peace. Instead, he abandoned Iraq and we are watching American defeat snatched from the jaws of victory.”
Yes, he “had only” to do that, and everything would have turned out fine. But who was it who signed the agreement mandating the removal of all American forces from Iraq by the end of 2011? It was George W. Bush. When the time arrived, the Maliki government was determined to get all American troops out, and refused to negotiate a new agreement without putting American troops at the mercy of the Iraqi justice system — something no American president would ever have accepted.
Obama faces an almost impossible situation. Short of an outright invasion, whatever we choose to do military is only going to have a limited impact on how this all ends. Some argue that Obama should have tried harder to negotiate a new agreement, to keep a small force there. The administration claims that would have been fruitless, because Maliki wouldn’t have allowed it. But this is all a counter-factual — and it should be noted that even if we had left a smaller force there, it still might not have been enough to determine the course of events. The big picture is that, if you were for withdrawal, you were inevitably going to be for giving up our influence over the country’s future.
Maybe that’s why the Cheneys’ op ed is silent on what they would do differently in Iraq today. The op-ed contains nothing even approaching a specific suggestion for what , other than to say that defeating terrorists “will require a strategy — not a fantasy. It will require sustained difficult military, intelligence and diplomatic efforts — not empty misleading rhetoric. It will require rebuilding America’s military capacity — reversing the Obama policies that have weakened our armed forces and reduced our ability to influence events around the world.”
So to recap: we need a strategy, and though they won’t tell us what that strategy might be, it should involve military, intelligence, and diplomatic efforts, and rebuilding the military. Apart from the absurd claim that the armed forces have been “weakened” (we’re still spending over $600 billion a year on the military even with the war in Iraq behind us and Afghanistan winding down), the Cheneys are about as clear on what we should do now as they were on how invading Iraq was supposed to spread peace and democracy across the Middle East.
Watch closely as Republicans troop to the TV studios in the coming days, because they’ll be saying much the same thing. They won’t bring up what a disaster the war was; they’ll hope you forget that they supported it, and they won’t mention that it was Bush who signed the agreement to remove all the troops from Iraq. They will say almost nothing about what they would do differently now, other than to say we have to be “strong” and “send the right message” to the terrorists.
When it comes to being wrong about Iraq, Dick Cheney has been in a class by himself. It was Cheney who said, “Simply stated, there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction. There is no doubt he is amassing them to use against our friends, against our allies, and against us.”
It was Cheney who said: “it’s been pretty well confirmed” that 9/11 hijacker Mohammed Atta “did go to Prague and he did meet with a senior official of the Iraqi intelligence service.”
It was Cheney who said: “we do know, with absolute certainty, that [Saddam Hussein] is using his procurement system to acquire the equipment he needs in order to enrich uranium to build a nuclear weapon”
It was Cheney who said in 2005: “I think they’re in the last throes, if you will, of the insurgency.”
All those things, and many more, were false. There is not a single person in America — not Bill Kristol, not Paul Wolfowitz, not Don Rumsfeld, no pundit, not even President Bush himself — who has been more wrong and more shamelessly dishonest on the topic of Iraq than Dick Cheney.
And now, as the cascade of misery and death and chaos he did so much to unleash rages anew, Cheney has the unadulterated gall to come before the country and tell us that it’s all someone else’s fault, and if we would only listen to him then we could keep America safe forever. How dumb would we have to be to listen?
-
The Collapsing Obama Doctrine
Rarely has a U.S. president been so wrong about so much at the expense of so many.
by DICK CHENEY And LIZ CHENEY
As the terrorists of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) threaten Baghdad, thousands of slaughtered Iraqis in their wake, it is worth recalling a few of President Obama's past statements about ISIS and al Qaeda. "If a J.V. team puts on Lakers' uniforms that doesn't make them Kobe Bryant" (January 2014). "[C]ore al Qaeda is on its heels, has been decimated" (August 2013). "So, let there be no doubt: The tide of war is receding" (September 2011).
Rarely has a U.S. president been so wrong about so much at the expense of so many. Too many times to count, Mr. Obama has told us he is "ending" the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan—as though wishing made it so. His rhetoric has now come crashing into reality. Watching the black-clad ISIS jihadists take territory once secured by American blood is final proof, if any were needed, that America's enemies are not "decimated." They are emboldened and on the march.
The fall of the Iraqi cities of Fallujah, Tikrit, Mosul and Tel Afar, and the establishment of terrorist safe havens across a large swath of the Arab world, present a strategic threat to the security of the United States. Mr. Obama's actions—before and after ISIS's recent advances in Iraq—have the effect of increasing that threat.
On a trip to the Middle East this spring, we heard a constant refrain in capitals from the Persian Gulf to Israel, "Can you please explain what your president is doing?" "Why is he walking away?" "Why is he so blithely sacrificing the hard fought gains you secured in Iraq?" "Why is he abandoning your friends?" "Why is he doing deals with your enemies?"
In one Arab capital, a senior official pulled out a map of Syria and Iraq. Drawing an arc with his finger from Raqqa province in northern Syria to Anbar province in western Iraq, he said, "They will control this territory. Al Qaeda is building safe havens and training camps here. Don't the Americans care?"
Our president doesn't seem to. Iraq is at risk of falling to a radical Islamic terror group and Mr. Obama is talking climate change. Terrorists take control of more territory and resources than ever before in history, and he goes golfing. He seems blithely unaware, or indifferent to the fact, that a resurgent al Qaeda presents a clear and present danger to the United States of America.
When Mr. Obama and his team came into office in 2009, al Qaeda in Iraq had been largely defeated, thanks primarily to the heroic efforts of U.S. armed forces during the surge. Mr. Obama had only to negotiate an agreement to leave behind some residual American forces, training and intelligence capabilities to help secure the peace. Instead, he abandoned Iraq and we are watching American defeat snatched from the jaws of victory.
The tragedy unfolding in Iraq today is only part of the story. Al Qaeda and its affiliates are resurgent across the globe. According to a recent Rand study, between 2010 and 2013, there was a 58% increase in the number of Salafi-jihadist terror groups around the world. During that same period, the number of terrorists doubled.
In the face of this threat, Mr. Obama is busy ushering America's adversaries into positions of power in the Middle East. First it was the Russians in Syria. Now, in a move that defies credulity, he toys with the idea of ushering Iran into Iraq. Only a fool would believe American policy in Iraq should be ceded to Iran, the world's largest state sponsor of terror.
This president is willfully blind to the impact of his policies. Despite the threat to America unfolding across the Middle East, aided by his abandonment of Iraq, he has announced he intends to follow the same policy in Afghanistan.
Despite clear evidence of the dire need for American leadership around the world, the desperation of our allies and the glee of our enemies, President Obama seems determined to leave office ensuring he has taken America down a notch. Indeed, the speed of the terrorists' takeover of territory in Iraq has been matched only by the speed of American decline on his watch.
The president explained his view in his Sept. 23, 2009, speech before the United Nations General Assembly. "Any world order," he said, "that elevates one nation above others cannot long survive." Tragically, he is quickly proving the opposite—through one dangerous policy after another—that without American pre-eminence, there can be no world order.
It is time the president and his allies faced some hard truths: America remains at war, and withdrawing troops from the field of battle while our enemies stay in the fight does not "end" wars. Weakness and retreat are provocative. U.S. withdrawal from the world is disastrous and puts our own security at risk.
Al Qaeda and its affiliates are resurgent and they present a security threat not seen since the Cold War. Defeating them will require a strategy—not a fantasy. It will require sustained difficult military, intelligence and diplomatic efforts—not empty misleading rhetoric. It will require rebuilding America's military capacity—reversing the Obama policies that have weakened our armed forces and reduced our ability to influence events around the world.
American freedom will not be secured by empty threats, meaningless red lines, leading from behind, appeasing our enemies, abandoning our allies, or apologizing for our great nation—all hallmarks to date of the Obama doctrine. Our security, and the security of our friends around the world, can only be guaranteed with a fundamental reversal of the policies of the past six years.
In 1983, President Ronald Reagan said, "If history teaches anything, it teaches that simple-minded appeasement or wishful thinking about our adversaries is folly. It means the betrayal of our past, the squandering of our freedom." President Obama is on track to securing his legacy as the man who betrayed our past and squandered our freedom.
Mr. Cheney was U.S. vice president from 2001-09. Ms. Cheney was the deputy assistant secretary of state for near eastern affairs from 2002-04 and 2005-06.
-
Dick Cheney, did you really want to go there?
by E.J. DIONNE JR.
The infinitely valuable Yiddish word chutzpah is defined as “shameless audacity” or “impudence.”
It’s singularly appropriate for the astonishing op-ed from former vice president Dick Cheney and his daughter Liz that was published in the Wall Street Journal on Wednesday. It’s not every day that a leader of the previous administration suggests that the current president is a “fool” and accuses him of intentionally weakening the United States.
“President Obama seems determined to leave office ensuring he has taken America down a notch,” the Cheneys write. Are they charging our president with treason? “President Obama,” they write, “is on track to securing his legacy as the man who betrayed our past and squandered our freedom.”
Squandered our freedom?
“Only a fool,” they say, “would believe American policy in Iraq should be ceded to Iran, the world’s largest state sponsor of terror.” As if this is what Obama is doing — and as if it weren’t the invasion Cheney so passionately supported that vastly strengthened Iran’s hand long before Obama took office.
The Cheney polemic would be outrageous even if our former vice president’s record on Iraq had been one of absolute clairvoyance. As it happens, he was wrong in almost every prediction he made about the war.
On March 16, 2003, days before the war started, Cheney sat down with the late Tim Russert on NBC’s “Meet the Press” for what still stands as the most revealing of the prewar interviews. Cheney was adamant that “to suggest that we need several hundred thousand troops there after military operations cease, after the conflict ends, I don’t think is accurate. I think that’s an overstatement.”
“We will, in fact, be greeted as liberators,” he famously said and proceeded to play down the very sectarian divisions that are plaguing the country now. Russert asked: “And you are convinced the Kurds, the Sunnis, the Shiites will come together in a democracy?” Cheney replied quickly: “They have so far.” He went on:
“If you look at the opposition, they’ve come together, I think, very effectively, with representatives from Shia, Sunni and Kurdish elements in the population. They understand the importance of preserving and building on an Iraqi national identity. They don’t like to have the U.S., for example, come in and insist on dealing with people sort of on a hyphenated basis — the Iraqi-Shia, Iraqi-Sunni — but rather to focus on Iraq as a nation and all that it can accomplish as a nation, and we try to be sensitive to those concerns. I think the prospects of being able to achieve this kind of success, if you will, from a political standpoint, are probably better than they would be for virtually any other country and under similar circumstances in that part of the world.”
Ah yes, regime change would work out just fine — better than fine. “Extremists in the region would have to rethink their strategy of jihad,” Cheney had told the Veterans of Foreign Wars seven months earlier. “Moderates throughout the region would take heart.” Plus a bonus: “Our ability to advance the Israeli-Palestinian peace process would be enhanced.” This was the war that would cure all that ailed us.
Thanks to the Cheney op-ed, we can see how Obama’s hawkish critics are out to create a double standard. Whenever they are called out for how mistaken they were about Iraq in the first place, they piously lecture against “relitigating the past” and say we must instead look forward. At the same time, many of them feel perfectly free to trash the president in extreme and even vile terms.
I am all for looking forward and trying to find an approach that squares the many contradictions we face: of needing to defeat the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria while also pushing Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki to stop pursuing anti-Sunni policies that are empowering the forces we need to turn back; of being on the same side as Iran in Iraq’s current emergency but on opposite sides over Syria; of wanting to avoid steps that will make things worse while not being paralyzed; and of not plunging into the middle of a Shiite-Sunni civil war while trying to stop the region’s descent into chaos.
Obama sees these contradictions and says he won’t act rashly. You don’t have to agree with Obama’s every move to prefer his prudence to the utter certainty that “we will be greeted as liberators” and to a habit of underestimating the costs of military action.
-
Cheney is worried about his legacy. Obama might, in a decade, but right now all he cares about is chooming and coke parties with beyonce.
-
Cheney is worried about his legacy. Obama might, in a decade, but right now all he cares about is chooming and coke parties with beyonce.
Obama is going to go down as worse than W in all respectas and you and every Obama dick sucking twinkle toes lib knows it
-
Cheney is worried about his legacy. Obama might, in a decade, but right now all he cares about is chooming and coke parties with beyonce.
ROFL!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! ;D
-
That warped sombitch figures he got away with some serious shit. All out. He's a psychopathic criminal of the worst kind. And when he and Rummie met back in 1968 or so, it was a most tragic day for America.
Just about everyone flatly rejects this fucker, even those that can't say exactly why.
So just goes to show, you can't get away with doing bad things, even if it seems like you're pulling a fast one on the people.
-
He needs to go far away and stay there - same w his daughter.
-
http://rare.us/story/megyn-kelly-slams-dick-cheney-history-has-proven-you-got-it-wrong-on-iraq/ (http://rare.us/story/megyn-kelly-slams-dick-cheney-history-has-proven-you-got-it-wrong-on-iraq/)
-
He needs to go far away and stay there - same w his daughter.
OMG! Has hell frozen over? ;D
-
OMG! Has hell frozen over? ;D
No - Cheney was a disaster, as is Obama. Both are psycopaths and NWO shills
-
Cheney isnt worried about a damn thing other than his oil buddies interests in Iraq PERIOD
-
No - Cheney was a disaster, as is Obama. Both are psycopaths and NWO shills
You now believe Bush/Cheney was a disaster? Or was Bush a success and Cheney (Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, etc.) the disaster?
-
You now believe Bush/Cheney was a disaster? Or was Bush a success and Cheney (Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, etc.) the disaster?
uummm - I was kicked off FR in 2005 for bashing W. W was a disaster and is the reason that we have Obama in the first place.
-
http://rare.us/story/megyn-kelly-slams-dick-cheney-history-has-proven-you-got-it-wrong-on-iraq/ (http://rare.us/story/megyn-kelly-slams-dick-cheney-history-has-proven-you-got-it-wrong-on-iraq/)
See, everything dick cheney says is awesome. And everything Megyn Kelly says is awesome.
Therefore, to resolve the conflict here, I shall declare this live FOX video was digitally created by liberal computer hackers, and it never really happened.
-
Dick Cheney's amazing chutzpah on Iraq
By Paul Waldman
You have to hand it to Dick Cheney. How many people, knowing what has happened in Iraq over the last 12 years, would dare to write an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal containing this line: "Rarely has a U.S. president been so wrong about so much at the expense of so many" -- and not be talking about George W. Bush? The man has chutzpah.
The op-ed in question was co-written with Cheney's daughter Liz, former State Department worker and failed Senate candidate. The two are forming a new organization, the Alliance for a Strong America.
Of all the former Bush administration officials who have emerged in the last few days to blame the deteriorating situation in Iraq on Barack Obama, one might think Cheney would be among the last.
It's one thing to turn on your TV and hear that Obama is a dangerous weakling from people like Paul Wolfowitz and William Kristol, the ones who told us that war with Iraq would be cheap and easy, then bring a wave of peace and democracy across the Middle East.
But Cheney?
Cheney was the war's chief propagandist, who told the American public more spectacular falsehoods than anyone, including Bush himself. Cheney was the one who told us in 2002 that "Simply stated, there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction. There is no doubt he is amassing them to use against our friends, against our allies, and against us."
He's the one who tried to convince us that Saddam Hussein might have helped engineer the September 11 attacks, and who said in 2005 that the insurgency in Iraq was "in its last throes." (The war went on for 6½ more years.)
Cheney had a central role in bringing on a war in which 4,500 Americans gave their lives, tens of thousands more were gravely injured, we spent a couple of trillion dollars, and somewhere between 100,000 and 500,000 Iraqis died.
Cheney's opinion appears to be that all that death and expense never really happened (he doesn't mention them), and that everything bad in Iraq can only be Obama's fault -- because the Bush administration did such a bang-up job there. "Mr. Obama had only to negotiate an agreement to leave behind some residual American forces, training and intelligence capabilities to help secure the peace," he writes. "Instead, he abandoned Iraq and we are watching American defeat snatched from the jaws of victory."
Would "some residual American forces" have been able to keep a lid on the unending Iraqi civil war that Bush and Cheney so effectively unleashed? We'll never really know, but here's what we do know: The agreement mandating that all American troops leave Iraq by the end of 2011 was signed by one George W. Bush, before Obama took office.
As negotiations over our departure proceeded in Obama's first term, Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki -- eager to have the Americans gone so he could consolidate what would turn out to be a corrupt sectarian rule -- refused to grant American troops immunity from prosecution in Iraqi courts. Without that immunity, there was simply no way American forces could remain there. We've heard many people say Obama "should have pushed harder," but nobody says exactly what that's supposed to mean, or why al-Maliki would have given in, especially considering how he's acted since.
And what does Cheney think we should do now? He doesn't seem to have any idea. The op-ed contains precisely zero recommendations about Iraq. Defeating al Qaeda, it says, "will require a strategy -- not a fantasy." But what is that strategy? "Sustained difficult military, intelligence and diplomatic efforts"? Oh, of course -- if only we had known!
At least he's not alone in his arrogance and befuddlement. None of Obama's other critics seem to have much of an idea what we should do in Iraq, or Syria, or anywhere else. They're happy to say that whatever Obama is doing isn't enough, and it isn't strong. But if you ask them to be specific about what different decisions they would make, you'll be met with hemming and hawing.
That's because there are only bad options for America in Iraq, as is often the case in the Middle East. If you delude yourself into thinking that wars are simple and easy, and all that matters is whether you're "strong," then sometimes things become quite clear. We'll just invade, we'll be "greeted as liberators" (that was Cheney, too), and everyone will live happily ever after.
And when what actually results is not that glorious and easy victory, but a tidal wave of violence and despair, then all you need to do is wait until after you leave office, when you can blame it all on someone else.
-
The Gall of Dick Cheney
by Charles Blow
The situation in Iraq is truly worrisome, as militants threaten to tear the country asunder and disrupt the fragile, short-lived period absent all-out war there.
We have strategic interests in preventing Iraq from unraveling, not least of which is that we don’t need the country to become a haven for terrorists, particularly those who might see America as a target.
And of course, there is the uneasy subject of oil: Volatility in the region has already sent global oil prices soaring. On Wednesday, militants were said to have taken control of Iraq’s largest oil refinery.
We have to tread carefully here. There are no saints to be seen in this situation. Everyone’s hands are bloody. And, we don’t want to again get mired in a conflict in a country from which we have only recently extricated ourselves.
As we weigh our response, one of the last people who should say anything on the subject is a man who is partly responsible for the problem.
But former Vice President Dick Cheney, who was in the administration that deceived us into a nine-year war in Iraq, just can’t seem to keep his peace.
In an Op-Ed published with his daughter, Liz, in The Wall Street Journal on Tuesday, the Cheneys write:
“Rarely has a U.S. president been so wrong about so much at the expense of so many.”
This, from the man who helped lead us into this trumped-up war, searching for nonexistent weapons of mass destruction, a war in which some 4,500 members of the American military were killed, many thousands more injured, and that is running a tab of trillions of dollars.
During the lead-up to the war, Mr. Cheney said to Tim Russert: “I really do believe that we will be greeted as liberators.” Nothing could have been further from the truth.
Even if it were indeed rare to be “so wrong,” as Mr. Cheney puts it, he was vice president in an administration that was much more tragically wrong. His whole legacy is wrapped in wrong.
At one point in the article, the Cheneys state:
“Iraq is at risk of falling to a radical Islamic terror group and Mr. Obama is talking climate change. Terrorists take control of more territory and resources than ever before in history, and he goes golfing.”
Mr. Cheney must think that we have all forgotten the scene from “Fahrenheit 9/11,” Michael Moore’s 2004 documentary, in which President George W. Bush, brandishing a club on a golf course, looks into the camera and says,
“I call upon all nations to do everything they can to stop these terrorist killers. Thank you.”
That is quickly followed by, “Now, watch this drive,” and a shot of Bush swinging at the ball.
In fact, on one of the rare occasions that Mr. Cheney was actually right, in 1994, he warned about the problems that would be created by deposing Saddam Hussein:
“Once you got to Iraq and took it over, and took down Saddam Hussein’s government, then what are you going to put in its place? That’s a very volatile part of the world, and if you take down the central government of Iraq you can easily end up seeing pieces of Iraq fly off. Part of it the Syrians would like to have to the west. Part of eastern Iraq, the Iranians would like to claim, fought over for eight years. In the north you’ve got the Kurds, and if the Kurds spin loose and join with the Kurds in Turkey, then you threaten the territorial integrity of Turkey. It’s a quagmire.”
That was quite prescient. And yet, the Bush administration pushed us into the Iraq war anyway, and the quagmire we now confront.
That’s why it’s so galling to read Mr. Cheney chastising this administration for its handling of the disaster that Mr. Cheney himself foresaw, but ignored.
I know that we as Americans have short attention spans, but most of us don’t suffer from amnesia. The Bush administration created this mess, and the Obama administration now has to clean it up.
The Cheneys wrote: “This president is willfully blind to the impact of his policies,” Mr. Cheney seemingly oblivious to the irony.
George W. Bush may well have been a disaster of a president (in a 2010 Siena College Research Institute survey, 238 presidential scholars ranked Bush among the five “worst ever” presidents in American history), but at least he has the dignity and grace — or shame and humility — to recede from public life with his family and his painting, and not chide and meddle with the current administration as it tries to right his wrong.
Mr. Cheney, meanwhile, is still trying to bend history toward an exoneration of his guilt and an expunging of his record. But history, on this, is stiff, and his record is written in blood.
-
it wasn't a good idea to listen to DC in 2003 and it still isn't a good idea today.
-
Shame on you, Dick Cheney, for forgetting who really got us into this Iraq mess
Dick Cheney and his daughter Liz sent some harsh words toward President Obama in a letter printed by The Wall Street Journal. Unfortunately, he forgot his own 'misleading, empty rhetoric' got us involved in Iraq in the first place.
by MIKE LUPICA
So here is an old war profiteer like Dick Cheney, one who received five deferments so as not to serve in Vietnam but couldn’t wait to send young Americans into a war in Iraq first chance he got, writing with his daughter Liz the other day in The Wall Street Journal.
No one is sure why Liz Cheney’s byline was on the piece, other than perhaps her father looking for something for her to do. Or trying to convince the country that she is part of some budding political dynasty.
But the money quote from the two of them, as they assail President Obama for his handling of the current situation in Iraq, is in the first sentence of the second paragraph:
“Rarely has a U.S. President been so wrong about so much at the expense of so many.”
Forget that Dick Cheney in particular here does such an embarrassingly bad job of channeling the language of Winston Churchill. Somehow Cheney, as much of a chowderhead about his place in American history as he is about most things, always saw himself as a Churchillian figure. Maybe so. He was carrying around way too much weight once.
All he has become, though, is noise, as he tries to point fingers and change the subject about the wreckage of a doomed policy on Iraq that he helped sell to George W. Bush, one built on the lie Cheney sold as hard as anyone about Saddam Hussein and weapons of mass destruction.
In the process, Cheney became every bustout old politician who ever sent American soldiers off to die in the kind of war he never had much interest in fighting himself. Now he thinks that earns him the right to lecture Barack Obama about a situation that Cheney and the Son of Bush helped create, in the most cynical possible way:
Trying to link Saddam Hussein and Iraq to Sept. 11.
“The President is willfully blind to the impact of his policies,” Cheney and his daughter, most recently notable as a failed Senate candidate in Wyoming, write.
No, it was Cheney who was blind to the impact of his own policies, in addition to being arrogant and stupid about the terrible consequences of his actions on Iraq, which ended up killing 4,500 American men and women and wounding nearly 10 times that; and wasting so much money in Iraq that the effects of the decisions they made in the early part of this century will probably still be felt in the next one.
Of course, he is defended by the pep squad boys and girls of the bullhorn media of the right, as if somehow he and Bush were the ones with the right answers about Iraq; as if the only relevant blood is on Obama’s hands, even though it is Obama who inherited this war the way he inherited an economy from Bush and Cheney that put this country into a sinkhole. Through it all, he still sees himself as the voice of reason and patriotism in Iraq.
He wants you to forget that it was his President, George W. Bush, who agreed to withdraw all troops from Iraq by the end of 2011, Bush’s way of procuring a status-of-forces agreement three years earlier. You are supposed to forget that a dim bulb like Nouri al-Maliki, the prime minister of Iraq, became a made man in that country on Bush’s watch.
Now all this time later, there is no sound military solution for Obama in Iraq because there is no solution at all. Now Sunni militants are battling for control of the country’s largest oil refinery, in Baiji, about 150 miles from Baghdad, and foreign workers at that refinery are being evacuated. This goes on while Obama tries to figure out a way to prop up Maliki one more time, or last time, with possible air strikes.
“Defeating (our enemies) will require a strategy — not a fantasy,” the Cheneys write. “It will require sustained, difficult military, intelligence and diplomatic efforts — not misleading, empty rhetoric.”
The fantasy, about weapons of mass destruction, actually came 11 years ago, from Cheney and Bush. The misleading, empty rhetoric was theirs. But the Cheneys say in the Journal that our security and the security of our allies can be assured only by the “fundamental reversal of the policies of the past six years.”
Americans who aren’t point-missers realize that the problem isn’t the last six years. The problem is the policies of the six years before Obama took office, and a military strategy that cost us all those American lives, and ruined so many countless others, all because neocons like Cheney needed a war to show the rest of the world how tough he and his President were.
Now here we are. Now Cheney wants to make this Obama’s fault. It is the last lie of the Bush administration, from its war-loving vice president. You know who the bum of Baghdad really is?
Dick Cheney.
-
Shame on you, Dick Cheney, for forgetting who really got us into this Iraq mess
Dick Cheney and his daughter Liz sent some harsh words toward President Obama in a letter printed by The Wall Street Journal. Unfortunately, he forgot his own 'misleading, empty rhetoric' got us involved in Iraq in the first place.
by MIKE LUPICA
So here is an old war profiteer like Dick Cheney, one who received five deferments so as not to serve in Vietnam but couldn’t wait to send young Americans into a war in Iraq first chance he got, writing with his daughter Liz the other day in The Wall Street Journal.
No one is sure why Liz Cheney’s byline was on the piece, other than perhaps her father looking for something for her to do. Or trying to convince the country that she is part of some budding political dynasty.
But the money quote from the two of them, as they assail President Obama for his handling of the current situation in Iraq, is in the first sentence of the second paragraph:
“Rarely has a U.S. President been so wrong about so much at the expense of so many.”
Forget that Dick Cheney in particular here does such an embarrassingly bad job of channeling the language of Winston Churchill. Somehow Cheney, as much of a chowderhead about his place in American history as he is about most things, always saw himself as a Churchillian figure. Maybe so. He was carrying around way too much weight once.
All he has become, though, is noise, as he tries to point fingers and change the subject about the wreckage of a doomed policy on Iraq that he helped sell to George W. Bush, one built on the lie Cheney sold as hard as anyone about Saddam Hussein and weapons of mass destruction.
In the process, Cheney became every bustout old politician who ever sent American soldiers off to die in the kind of war he never had much interest in fighting himself. Now he thinks that earns him the right to lecture Barack Obama about a situation that Cheney and the Son of Bush helped create, in the most cynical possible way:
Trying to link Saddam Hussein and Iraq to Sept. 11.
“The President is willfully blind to the impact of his policies,” Cheney and his daughter, most recently notable as a failed Senate candidate in Wyoming, write.
No, it was Cheney who was blind to the impact of his own policies, in addition to being arrogant and stupid about the terrible consequences of his actions on Iraq, which ended up killing 4,500 American men and women and wounding nearly 10 times that; and wasting so much money in Iraq that the effects of the decisions they made in the early part of this century will probably still be felt in the next one.
Of course, he is defended by the pep squad boys and girls of the bullhorn media of the right, as if somehow he and Bush were the ones with the right answers about Iraq; as if the only relevant blood is on Obama’s hands, even though it is Obama who inherited this war the way he inherited an economy from Bush and Cheney that put this country into a sinkhole. Through it all, he still sees himself as the voice of reason and patriotism in Iraq.
He wants you to forget that it was his President, George W. Bush, who agreed to withdraw all troops from Iraq by the end of 2011, Bush’s way of procuring a status-of-forces agreement three years earlier. You are supposed to forget that a dim bulb like Nouri al-Maliki, the prime minister of Iraq, became a made man in that country on Bush’s watch.
Now all this time later, there is no sound military solution for Obama in Iraq because there is no solution at all. Now Sunni militants are battling for control of the country’s largest oil refinery, in Baiji, about 150 miles from Baghdad, and foreign workers at that refinery are being evacuated. This goes on while Obama tries to figure out a way to prop up Maliki one more time, or last time, with possible air strikes.
“Defeating (our enemies) will require a strategy — not a fantasy,” the Cheneys write. “It will require sustained, difficult military, intelligence and diplomatic efforts — not misleading, empty rhetoric.”
The fantasy, about weapons of mass destruction, actually came 11 years ago, from Cheney and Bush. The misleading, empty rhetoric was theirs. But the Cheneys say in the Journal that our security and the security of our allies can be assured only by the “fundamental reversal of the policies of the past six years.”
Americans who aren’t point-missers realize that the problem isn’t the last six years. The problem is the policies of the six years before Obama took office, and a military strategy that cost us all those American lives, and ruined so many countless others, all because neocons like Cheney needed a war to show the rest of the world how tough he and his President were.
Now here we are. Now Cheney wants to make this Obama’s fault. It is the last lie of the Bush administration, from its war-loving vice president. You know who the bum of Baghdad really is?
Dick Cheney.
That was a fun read. Thanks.
Article needs to end in "BOOM!" a la vintage SC/333386, though, imo.
-
Cheney's daughter is a chip off the old block, I see.
She repulses me.
-
Dick Cheney wants to forget history and write his own version
by WALTER PINCUS
Why should anyone take seriously what Dick Cheney says about President Obama’s policy in Iraq?
In their Wall Street Journal op-ed this week, Cheney and his daughter Liz began by cherry- picking Obama quotes from over three years about the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS).
That warmed-over technique is what Cheney, President George W. Bush and other top aides cleverly used with intelligence reports in the fall of 2002 as they drummed up public support for their invasion of Iraq. That, of course, set the stage for today’s terrible events.
“Rarely has a U.S. president been so wrong about so much at the expense of so many,” the Cheneys chortled. “Too many times to count, Mr. Obama has told us he is ‘ending’ the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan — as though wishing made it so.”
Let’s return to a Dick Cheney speech on Aug. 27, 2002, in Nashville, before the Veterans of Foreign Wars (VFW) and see how many times a vice president could be “so wrong about so much at the expense of so many.”
He told his audience: “In Afghanistan, the Taliban regime and al-Qaeda terrorists have met the fate they chose for themselves. And they saw . . . the new methods and capabilities of America’s armed services.”
Here’s another applause line: “In the case of Osama bin Laden — as President Bush said recently — ‘If he’s alive, we’ll get him. If he’s not alive — we already got him.”
The Bush team never got him. Obama did.
When Cheney was speaking, bin Laden was very much alive. Al-Qaeda terrorists and the Taliban had just retreated, but they were able to regroup as the Bush team, satisfied with its “victory” in Afghanistan, had turned its attention and U.S. military forces toward Iraq.
It was in this speech that Cheney began what a former Bush chief of staff, Andrew Card, would describe as the fall 2002 public-relations plan to “educate the public” about the so-called threat from Iraq. That effort would lead to a congressional joint resolution authorizing the president to use U.S. armed forces to “defend the national security of the United States against the continuing threat posed by Iraq” and “enforce all relevant United Nations Security Council resolutions regarding Iraq.”
Cheney told the VFW: “The Iraqi regime has in fact been very busy enhancing its capabilities in the field of chemical and biological agents. And they continue to pursue the nuclear program they began so many years ago.”
He added: “We’ve gotten this from the firsthand testimony of defectors — including Saddam’s own son-in-law, who was subsequently murdered at Saddam’s direction. Many of us are convinced that Saddam will acquire nuclear weapons fairly soon.”
A former White House deputy press secretary, Scott McClellan, would later write that a White House Iraq Group (WHIG) was “set up in the summer of 2002 to coordinate the marketing of the [Iraq] war,” and will continue “as a strategic communications group after the invasion had toppled Saddam [Hussein]’s regime.”
It was Cheney at the VFW convention who first said: “Regime change in Iraq would bring about a number of benefits to the region. When the gravest of threats are eliminated, the freedom-loving peoples of the region will have a chance to promote the values that can bring lasting peace.”
He also said: “Extremists in the region would have to rethink their strategy of Jihad. Moderates throughout the region would take heart. And our ability to advance the Israeli-Palestinian peace process would be enhanced, just as it was following the liberation of Kuwait in 1991.”
Show me a better example of “as though wishing made it so.”
The Cheneys also cavalierly forget that the status of forces agreement with Iraq that Bush signed Dec. 14, 2008, made way for the withdrawal of all U.S. combat troops by the end of 2011. That agreement protected U.S. forces on duty from prosecution by Iraqi courts. It was the Iraqis’ desire to modify this that led Obama — on the advice of his military chiefs — to not leave a residual force of military trainers.
One more sign of the Cheneys’ convenient amnesia: They said of Obama’s initiative toward involving Tehran in the effort to put down ISIS advances in Iraq, “Only a fool would believe American policy in Iraq should be ceded to Iran, the world’s largest sponsor of terror.”
In November 2001, the Bush White House, despite icy relations, approved talking directly to Iran diplomats before and during the Bonn conference called to try to establish a post-Taliban government in Afghanistan. As a result, U.S. Ambassador James Dobbin got what he described as Tehran’s “major contribution to forge a solution” among various Afghan groups, which in turn led to a unified temporary Kabul government under Hamid Karzai.
On Dec. 5, 2001, a White House spokesman described Bush as “very pleased” with the Afghan agreement. However, in his Jan. 29, 2002, State of the Union speech, Bush described Iran, Iraq and North Korea as the “axis of evil” at the same time there were meetings underway between U.S. and Iranian diplomats to see whether talks could go beyond Afghanistan.
In contrast to the Cheneys, people should listen to former secretary of state James Baker III, who in Thursday’s Wall Street Journal called on the United States to organize an international coalition of regional countries, including Iran. Recalling Iran’s cooperation on Afghanistan, Baker said today’s “reality is that Iran is already the most influential external player in Iraq and so any effort without Iranian participation will likely fail.”
Baker has a successful track record and a memory. The Cheneys have neither.
-
His daughter is a Log Cabin Republican? ???
-
His daughter is a Log Cabin Republican? ???
the lesbian one. the other is just a c%$#
-
the lesbian one. the other is just a c%$#
;D
-
Dick Cheney, Rand Paul spar over blame for Iraq crisis
By Benjy Sarlin
Senator Rand Paul and former Vice President Dick Cheney sparred over Iraq on Sunday in dueling TV appearances, with the Kentucky Republican blaming the Bush administration for the current crisis and Cheney accusing President Obama of inviting “another 9/11.”
Paul, who has long called for reducing American involvement in foreign conflicts, suggested in an appearance on NBC’s “Meet The Press” that Cheney lacked credibility in the debate. In a Wall Street Journal op-ed last week, the ex-vice president and daughter Liz Cheney wrote: “Rarely has a U.S. president been so wrong about so much at the expense of so many.”
“You know, were they right in their predictions? Were there weapons of mass destruction there? Was the war won in 2005, when many of those people said it was won?” Paul asked.
Paul said that he did not see recent insurgent gains as a failure of the Obama administration, but as one of a number of dire consequences of the second Iraq War.
“I don’t blame President Obama,” Paul said. “Has he really got the solution? Maybe there is no solution. But I do blame those who are for the Iraq War for emboldening Iran. These are the same people now who are petrified of what Iran may become, and I understand some of their worry.”
The Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), a radical Sunni insurgency, has taken over large swaths of Iraq in recent weeks with much of the American-trained Iraqi military abandoning its posts in Sunni cities. In recent days, ISIS forces have reportedly seized border crossings with Syria and are threatening the country’s largest oil refineries. Shiite fighters have taken to the streets in Baghdad, pledging to repel any advance on the nation’s largest city and raising the specter of a broadening sectarian war in the region.
Paul did criticize the Obama administration for supplying aid to rebels in Syria engaged in a brutal civil war against dictator Bashar al-Assad, rebutting Republican and Democratic hawks who argue the White House should have backed moderate anti-Assad factions even earlier to foster an alternative to the radical Islamic State of Iraq and Syria.
“I personally believe [ISIS] would not be in Iraq and not be as powerful if we had not been supplying their allies in the war,” Paul said. Without American aid, he suggested that Assad might have “wiped these people out months ago.”
In a separate interview with CNN’s ”State of the Union,” Paul said countries like Iraq and Libya where the US had intervened militarily had become a “jihadist wonderland” and predicted the same fate for Syria if Assad fell.
Cheney, in an appearance on ABC’s “This Week With George Stephanopolous,” rebutted Paul’s charge that his previous failures to predict developments in Iraq and stabilize the country made his views less relevant.
“If we spend our time debating what happened 11 or 12 years ago we’re going to miss the threat that is growing,” Cheney said. “Rand Paul, with all due respect, is basically an isolationist. He doesn’t believe we ought to be involved with that part of the world.”
Cheney offered few specific prescriptions for how to handle the crisis in Iraq, instead accusing Obama of a broad failure to confront gathering threats in Pakistan, North Korea, Syria, and elsewhere.
“I think at this point there are no good easy answers in Iraq,” he said.
-
Dick Cheney's Op-Ed about the war in Iraq is full of lies
BY Linda Stasi
Why can’t you ever find a cop when you need one?
Take, for example, one man who – were he in an opposing government, we would probably accuse of mass murderer – is on the loose in our country and on full display in Rupert Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal.
Vice President Dick Cheney, who should have been convicted of murder and crimes against humanity, remains, instead, as loose as his lips.
In fact, last week the shameless sociopath and his daughter, Liz, (who seemed to be there in name only) wrote an Op-Ed piece in the Journal, expressing his disgust at the way the current administration has handled his war.
Clearly unfazed that he and his unindicted coconspirator, George The Brain Dead, were responsible for the deaths of 4,500 American and at least 500,000 Iraqis (two-thirds of whom were women and children, according to The Lancet) in an illegal war that left 51,000 Americans wounded, Little Dick-of-Death, is still trying to shove his lies down our throats.
Problem is, nobody but The Wall Street Journal seems to be opening wide and saying, “ahhh.”
It’s particularly interesting that Dickie’s Op-Ed appeared in the bible of finance, and yet there was no mention of the financial burden his 12-year war has put upon us taxpaying slobs.
Estimates go as high as $6 trillion, even though the Bush administration had predicted the whole thing would cost between $100 and $200 billion, done, finished, the end.
That bit of over-budgeting comes to about $75,000 for every U.S. household.
Dick, formerly the CEO of Halliburton, also forgot to mention that a Halliburton subsidiary, KBR, reaped $39.5 billion from the war, according to the Financial Times.
In the Op-Ed, Cheney scoffs at the naiveté of President Obama for claiming in 2011, “The tide of war is receding.”
Apparently Dickie forgot about his boss’ famous “Mission Accomplished” speech just weeks after invading Iraq in 2003.
Cheney even criticized President Obama for taking a day off, saying, “Terrorists take control of more territory and resources than ever before in history, and (Obama) goes golfing.”
Meantime, No. 43 spent more than one year of his presidency at his ranch, often shooting doves (tragic irony noted).
But of all the lies in Cheney’s disgusting Op-Ed none is as insulting to the American people as this one: “Rarely has a U.S. President been so wrong about so much at the expense of so many.”
This from the man who helped usher in one of the longest wars in U.S. history, based on the bald-faced lie that Saddam Hussein was stockpiling weapons of mass destruction to destroy the United States.
Cheney should return to shooting just his friends in the heart, because the rest of us are already heartbroken by what he did.
-
Rand is on board 100% with the new FOX/GOP directive.
he's stopped talking about obamacare.
he's supporting amnesty.
he's attacking cheney/bush/obama for Iraq, painting it as an unjust war and folly of the Dems.
What a shame. RINO Rand :-[
-
Cheney’s Back, Blitzing Rivals and Drawing Scorn
By PETER BAKER
As his heart failed a couple of summers after leaving office, former Vice President Dick Cheney slipped into a coma and, by his later account, spent weeks dreaming that he was in a countryside villa north of Rome, padding down a stone path every morning to pick up a newspaper or coffee.
Yet Mr. Cheney was never one to slip into quiet retirement in Italy or, for that matter, at his Wyoming ranch. Two years after a heart transplant reinvigorated him physically, he seems reinvigorated politically, too, as he takes on President Obama, Hillary Rodham Clinton, Bill Clinton, radical Islam, Senator Rand Paul, his own party — and history.
Frustrated by what he considers the president’s weakness as extremist groups seize wide portions of Iraq, Mr. Cheney, 73, has blitzed the airwaves in recent weeks and formed a new organization to promote American national security in a perilous time. He has drawn nothing but scorn from Democrats and even some Republicans who view his remonstrations as the height of hubris from someone they blame for many of the country’s difficulties. To them, he is a punch line.
But Mr. Cheney’s ability to command attention speaks to his distinctive place in the public arena. He is blunt, he is unapologetic and he is seemingly immune to the barbs aimed his way. He remains driven by the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and determined to guard the nation against the dangers he sees. If the rest of the world has moved on, he has not. “I’m not running for anything,” he told Charlie Rose in one of his multiple interviews of late. “I get to say exactly what I think.”
Some have no interest in listening. On MSNBC and on liberal op-ed pages and websites, his re-emergence has provided endless fodder for who-is-he-to-talk commentary. Some activists even argued he should be barred from television because they view him as discredited.
For a White House beleaguered on multiple fronts, the former vice president’s return is in fact a welcome opportunity to focus attention on decisions made by Mr. Cheney and President George W. Bush rather than defending Mr. Obama’s own handling of foreign policy, which most Americans disapprove of in polls.
“He’s like the A-Rod of politics,” said David Plouffe, the longtime Obama strategist, referring to Alex Rodriguez, the scandal-tarnished baseball star. “No one wants to hear from him, especially when he is trying to create an alternate reality to the one he is responsible for.”
Mr. Cheney thrust himself back into the debate with a Wall Street Journal op-ed on June 17 that was written with his daughter, Liz Cheney, assailing Mr. Obama’s foreign policy as Islamic militants carve a virtual state of their own in Syria and Iraq. “Rarely has a U.S. president been so wrong about so much at the expense of so many,” they wrote.
The broadside prompted a variety of retorts. Mr. Clinton scoffed at Mr. Cheney for trying to blame Mr. Obama for “not cleaning up the mess that he made.” It was, Mr. Clinton said, “unseemly.” Mr. Cheney fired back with an allusion to Mr. Clinton’s sexual scandals. “If there’s somebody who knows something about unseemly, it’s Bill Clinton,” he said.
Continue reading the main storyContinue reading the main storyContinue reading the main story
Even some Republicans took aim at Mr. Cheney. Rather than blame Mr. Obama for the current mess in the Middle East, Mr. Paul, the Kentucky senator considering a run for the White House, said, “The same questions could be asked of those who supported the Iraq war.” Mr. Cheney called Mr. Paul “basically an isolationist” and said “that didn’t work in the 1930s; it sure as heck won’t work in the aftermath of 9/11.”
The back and forth highlights the tension inside a party where some want to move away from the hawkish internationalism championed by Mr. Cheney. “With his long track record of bad judgment, Cheney’s efforts to depict more prudent and thoughtful Republicans, such as Rand Paul, as isolationists is ridiculous,” said Richard Burt, a former diplomat for President Ronald Reagan and the elder President George Bush who has been advising Mr. Paul.
Still others in the party worry that Mr. Cheney crowds out the growth of a new generation. “One of the challenges of a Cheney re-emergence is the party does need new leaders, new voices, new visions on national security policy and overall foreign policy to emerge,” said Kevin Madden, a party strategist who advised Mitt Romney.
But Mr. Cheney still has a strong following in some corners of the Republican Party that are glad to have him making the case when others do not. “A good number of people have contacted me and said it’s great to see him out there,” said John McConnell, a former speechwriter for Mr. Cheney.
Bill Kristol, editor of the Weekly Standard, said Mr. Obama’s failures made Americans more receptive to hawkish arguments. “A lot of people will say: ‘Good points. Does it have to be Dick Cheney making them? He’s got so much baggage,’ ” Mr. Kristol said. “I always find that too clever by half. I think Dick Cheney is very popular among conservative Republicans.”
Mr. Cheney’s latest public foray, friends said, reflects a genuine dismay about the chaos rocking the Middle East. He and Liz Cheney, a former State Department official, returned from a March trip to the region expressing surprise at how much consternation they detected about what they see as America’s retreat.
In television interviews, Mr. Cheney acknowledged the Iraq war did not go as well as predicted but said he and Mr. Bush turned things around with a troop increase and alliances with Sunni tribes in 2007, leaving behind a relatively stable situation that in his view Mr. Obama then squandered.
The Cheneys in turn decided to form the Alliance for a Strong America and tapped Brian Jones, a former adviser to Senator John McCain, to help out. “The primary focus of the group will be to educate people of the dangers of an isolationist foreign policy, the type being advocated inside and outside the party,” Mr. Jones said.
The organization also provides a new public platform for Ms. Cheney after an abortive campaign for Senate, when Ms. Cheney spoke out against same-sex marriage. The Cheneys have tried to move beyond the subsequent family rupture that occurred: The vice president’s other daughter, Mary Cheney, who is married to another woman, publicly criticized her sister. Liz Cheney ultimately dropped out of the race, citing an unrelated family emergency.
It is not clear whether the sisters have made up. Asked about the foreign policy group, Mary Cheney demurred. “I’m not involved in his new organization,” she said by email, without elaborating.
Former Senator Alan K. Simpson, a longtime Cheney friend, said Mr. Cheney understood that speaking out on Iraq would draw fire from “the haters” who “love to demonize him.”
No matter, he said. “He’s got a skin that’s like a rhinoceros,” Mr. Simpson said. “When you have your skin ripped off as many times as I have and he has, it grows back double strength.”
-
The last throes of Dick Cheney
Review of "Exceptional: Why the World Needs a Powerful America," by Dick Cheney and Liz Cheney
By Carlos Lozada
EXCEPTIONAL: Why the World Needs a Powerful America
By Dick Cheney and Liz Cheney
Threshold Editions. 324 pp. $28.
It was a classic Washington split-screen moment.
On May 21, 2009, minutes apart and just a mile and a half away from each other, President Obama and former vice president Dick Cheney offered dueling visions of America’s war on terrorism — of Guantanamo and torture, of surveillance and civil liberties. Speaking at the National Archives, Obama decried the previous administration’s “hasty decisions” and said essential American values had been discarded “as luxuries that we could no longer afford.” Cheney, holding court at the hawkish American Enterprise Institute, defended “enhanced interrogations” as legal and valuable, and warned that “in the fight against terrorism, there is no middle ground, and half-measures keep you half-exposed.”
I was in the second row at Cheney’s speech, and I recall the energy in the room as the former vice president approached the lectern. Only recently out of office, Cheney still mattered. He embodied a worldview that carried sway. In 2009, Obama v. Cheney was a heavyweight prizefight.
Six years later, Cheney is out with a new book on national security and is once again scheduled to deliver a speech at AEI, with Obama again as his foil. But it’s hard to muster the same excitement. It is far from clear that Cheney’s arguments, calcified in the intervening years, wield much influence anymore, even within his own party, or that they should. Rather than a slugfest, this feels like a swan song.
And it is a song he performs, in perfect Cheney pitch, with “Exceptional.” Co-written with his daughter Liz Cheney, the book is part history of America’s role in the world since World War II, part assault on Obama’s record on foreign and defense policy, and part relentlessly militaristic to-do list for the next commander in chief. “Our next president must be committed to restoring America’s power and strength,” the Cheneys write. “Our security and the survival of freedom depend on it.”
In the authors’ telling, America’s influence over world events has been almost entirely benevolent, as leaders from Roosevelt and Truman to Reagan and George W. Bush stared down tyrants and dispensed freedom and security. “We are, as a matter of empirical fact and undeniable history,” the Cheneys explain, “the greatest force for good the world has ever known.” From D-Day through the Cold War and into the age of terror, “security and freedom for millions of people around the globe have depended on America’s military, economic, political, and diplomatic might.”
Until 2009, that is. “President Obama has diminished American power and retreated from the field of battle, fueling rising threats against our nation,” the authors write. “He has pursued a foreign policy built on appeasing our adversaries, abandoning our allies, and apologizing for America.”
The Cheneys repeatedly accuse Obama and his administration of misleading the American public — particularly regarding the Iran nuclear deal and the Benghazi attack — subsuming foreign policy to domestic political considerations, underestimating the threat posed by the Islamic State and other terrorist groups, and ceding global initiative and influence to Moscow, Tehran and Beijing. More fundamentally, they contend, Obama simply does not get America. “The touchstone of his ideology — that America is to blame and her power must be restrained — requires a willful blindness about what America has done in the world,” the Cheneys write. “It is fundamentally counterfactual.”
All histories are selective histories, and in this respect “Exceptional” does not disappoint. The Vietnam War, for example, receives perfunctory treatment, perhaps because it doesn’t fit the story line of unambiguous American goodness. “The objective of preventing a Communist takeover of South Vietnam was a worthy one,” the Cheneys write. “There were many errors in the way America pursued this objective, about which much has been written elsewhere.” The main error they raise is the one hawks always raise: that in Vietnam, America did not fight to win.
On the Iraq war, “Exceptional” is entirely Cheneyesque — undoubting, unyielding and ultimately unconvincing. “U.S. troops . . . were, in fact, greeted as liberators,” they write, a defense of Vice President Cheney’s prediction on the eve of the invasion. While acknowledging that “we now know” Saddam Hussein did not possess stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction, the authors argue that the Iraqi leader was still a threat to U.S. security, because Iraq was “the most likely nexus” between terrorists and the weapons they sought. And they emphasize all that America accomplished in Iraq, such as deposing a dictator and providing security for the people as they voted in their first free elections.
“Those who say the invasion of Iraq in 2003 was a mistake are essentially saying we would be better off if Saddam Hussein were still in power,” they write. The Cheneys don’t question whether Americans would have supported the invasion solely because Iraq was a “likely nexus” for terrorism and because U.S. troops could bring freedom to a long-suffering people, rather than because of its supposed possession of weapons of mass destruction, affirmed by the vice president and so many other Bush administration officials.
The closest “Exceptional” comes to contrition concerns the execution of the war, not its rationale, but even then it stops short. “The war to liberate Iraq was indisputably difficult,” the authors write. “It included tragedy and challenges we did not foresee. Every war does, but these tragedies and challenges do not detract from the rightness of our cause.”
History is written by the victors, and also by those who convince themselves that they won.
The Iraq experience adds an extra hurdle of credibility for the Cheneys’ warnings about Iran and the nuclear accord the United States and other powers recently reached with that country. “The Obama agreement will lead to a nuclear-armed Iran, a nuclear arms race in the Middle East, and more than likely, the first use of a nuclear weapon since Hiroshima and Nagasaki,” they write. Obama’s successor must junk the deal, they argue — just one of many items a new president must get to right away.
Their list is a throwback. It features a massive military buildup, including new missile-defense systems, more nuclear weapons and a force prepared to wage war in multiple geographic locations simultaneously. The Cheneys also call for the restoration of National Security Agency’s surveillance authorities, the return of “enhanced” interrogation of terrorism suspects, the deployment of thousands of military “advisors” to battle the Islamic State and a halt to the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan. They also advocate aggressive actions against rival nations, such as sending troops to NATO countries that border Russia, in order to “signal American determination.”
Otherwise, the authors write, militant Islam will spread across the globe; Iran and other countries will go nuclear; China will dominate Asia and target America; and Russia will overpower Europe, enslaving free nations and destroying NATO.
The Cheneys rarely grapple with counterarguments or inconvenient facts. They say that harsh interrogations “saved lives and prevented attacks” but ignore the Senate Intelligence Committee’s recent report, which after a five-year investigation concluded that such techniques did not work. (“Feinstein, Dianne” does not appear in the book’s index.) When they chastise Obama for setting a timetable for the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq, they forget that Bush did the same. They complain that President Dwight Eisenhower’s farewell speech on the military-industrial complex has been “distorted” and selectively quoted by critics of the military, and then proceed to do the same with Obama’s remarks on American exceptionalism.
At a time when the Republican presidential candidates offer get-tough bromides and obsess over the Mexican border, a thoughtful and reasoned critique of Obama’s foreign policy is needed. But “Exceptional” does not provide it. It is heavy on self-justifications and conservative talking points, light on self-awareness. “One might ask why the administration worked so hard to ignore evidence and peddle a false narrative about what happened,” the Cheneys write regarding Benghazi. It is a question that might be asked of other administrations during other crises, too.
The former vice president has not endorsed anyone in the 2016 Republican field, and none of the candidates seems particularly eager to claim him as a foreign policy adviser. It’s probably just as well. When American exceptionalism is conflated with militarism and jingoism, it leaves little room for the traditions of reinvention and self-assessment that make America’s exceptional nature come alive.
America is exceptional. Dick Cheney is, too.
-
Jeb claims the Iraqi War was actually a good deal.
-
Dick Cheney tries to fool the public again
By Dana Milbank
Early signs indicate Dick Cheney is leaning against the Iran nuclear deal.
“It is madness,” the former vice president announced Tuesday.
“The results may be catastrophic,” he inveighed.
“This deal gives Tehran the means to launch a nuclear attack on the U.S. homeland.”
“The Obama-Iran deal aids the efforts of America’s enemies.”
The deal “strengthens our adversaries, threatens our allies and puts our own security at risk.”
Cheney hyperbolized, hyperventilated and gave rein to hyperactive imagination — “desperation . . . cave . . . neutered” — and the audience at the normally sedate American Enterprise Institute was riled. When Michaela Anang, a student from Boston with the liberal group Code Pink attempted to heckle the “war criminal” Cheney, Marc Thiessen, the moderator (and online columnist for The Post), leaped up to block her, audience members shouted “get out of here!” at her, and one man, in jacket and tie, engaged her in a violent tug of war to confiscate her banner.
“Thank you very much,” Cheney said with a wry grin.
Supporters of the Iran deal are probably saying the same to Cheney. They are probably more grateful still that applauding Cheney from the front row were Paul D. Wolfowitz, a principal architect of the Iraq war, and Sen. Tom Cotton, (Ark.), author of the Senate Republicans’ letter to the ayatollahs attempting to kill the deal during negotiations. In the second row were former congresswoman Michele Bachmann and I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, the Cheney aide whose tenure led to a prison sentence.
Surely, those who would like to see Congress undo the nuclear agreement can’t expect that rolling out Cheney is going to save the cause. When it comes to dire predictions based on scary intelligence, the former vice president wouldn’t seem to have the best track record.
Moments after Cheney’s speech came reports that the number of Senate Democrats supporting the Iran deal had climbed to 41 — more than enough to sustain a presidential veto of any congressional disapproval of the deal, and possibly enough to block such a disapproval resolution from clearing Congress. This came despite an all-out campaign by the once-feared American Israel Public Affairs Committee and its affiliates, which spent tens of millions of dollars to rally opposition; The Post called it the largest defeat for AIPAC in more than two decades. The deal’s survival also suggests Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s extraordinary meddling in American politics backfired.
A lecture on veracity and falsehood from the man who asserted before the Iraq invasion that Saddam Hussein had reconstituted nuclear weapons ? The man who said hitting Iraq would strike “a major blow right” at the base of the 9/11 terrorists? The man who claimed that Iraq had “long-established ties with al Qaeda” and that it was “pretty well confirmed” that 9/11 mastermind Mohamed Atta met with senior Iraqi intelligence officials?
Most everybody — including former president George W. Bush’s brother, presidential candidate Jeb Bush — has come to acknowledge that, given the absence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, the United States should not have gone to war in 2003. But not Cheney. When Thiessen relayed a question to him about whether containment of Saddam would have been better than military action, Cheney said “I disagree.”
He unabashedly made allegations against Iran Tuesday that he once made against Iraq, citing evidence of “an agreement between the Iranian government and al Qaeda.” Echoing the old warnings about Iraq’s “mushroom cloud,” he noted that a nuclear Iran could kill 6 million Jews in a day. He acknowledged that intelligence failed to predict the North Korea nuclear test when he was in office — but only to argue that there should be “serious concern” about Obama’s claim that it would take Iran a year to produce nuclear weapons.
There should be concern about Obama’s claims — but there should be even more about Cheney’s. He said, for example, that the deal “threatens the security of Europe” without acknowledging that European powers negotiated it. Dropping his longstanding quest to expand executive power, he said Congress should have seized the authority to ratify the deal.
Cheney said it’s a “false choice” to claim the alternative to the deal is war. But he went on to say that unless Iran makes much deeper concessions, “they must understand that the United States stands ready to take military action . . . Iran will not be convinced to abandon its program peacefully unless it knows it will face military action if it refuses to do so.”
And this isn’t war? In the immortal words of George W. Bush: “You can’t get fooled again.”
-
People still support and defend this liar.
-
Bah ha ha ha ha
-
FOX news' Chris Wallace owned the SHIT out of Cheney.
Cheney blamed Iran's mess on obama - then Wallace pointed out they had all these things when obama took office - and cheney just kept right on rambling his talking points.
Worst media owning I've seen in months.
-
Dude is in total denial. And what is his daughter doing there? Bah!
-
Cost of Cheney's Lies about Iraq:
4,700: U.S. service personnel killed directly
35,000: Troops injured (not including PTSD)
655,000: Persons who have died in Iraq who would not have died without the invasion
2.8 million: Persons who remain either internally displaced or have fled the country
$2 trillion: Amount in war expenses spent by the U.S. Treasury Department
$490 billion: Amount in war benefits owed to war veterans
$7 trillion: Projected interest payments due by 2053 on money borrowed for war
$20 billion: Amount paid to KBR, contractor responsible for equipment and services.
$3 billion: Amount of KBR payments Pentagon auditors considered "questionable."
$60 billion: Amount paid for reconstruction - largely a waste due to corruption
Missing: $546 million in spare parts; 190,000 guns, including 110,000 AK-47s
Missing: $6.6 billion sent by the planeload in cash and intended for Iraq's reconstruction after the start of the war
$75 billion: amount expected to go to American companies, largest of all Halliburton
0: Nuclear Weapons of Mass Destruction found
Ooops! :-X