Originally broadcast June 21, 2014
When Dick Cheney left office he wanted Iraq to go away. And now it is. Soon Iraq will be divided into three parts as thousands more die from Cheney’s blunder.
Dick and Liz Cheney, his snarling lapdog for a daughter, penned a piece in Tuesday’s Wall Street Journal. Their opening paragraph included these words about the calamitous situation in Iraq:
Rarely has a U.S. president been so wrong about so much at the expense of so many.
One would think that sentence was part of a larger mea culpa as Cheney, the de facto president between 2001-2009, finally took responsibility for the grievous injuries he inflicted on Iraq and our soldiers.
Rarely has a U.S. president been so wrong about so much at the expense of so many.
It was Dick Cheney’s responsibility to organize a terrorism task force, which gathered only once and then again inside the White House bunker on 9/11.
Liz Cheney making the case for not trying daddy as a war criminal
Then Cheney failed to grab Bin Laden even though in late 2001 the CIA had him in their crosshairs at Tora Bora, but Defense Secretary Rumsfeld, Cheney’s friend, wanted credit for the kill, so the CIA stood down.
Bin Laden got away as Cheney visited the CIA to cherry pick any evidence suggesting Iraq had WMDs even though the U.N., France, Germany, Great Britain and our own intelligence agencies said otherwise. Read the Downing Street memos. Tony Blair knew there were no WMDs, but he also knew if he went along on the ride into Baghdad there were lucrative post prime ministerial jobs waiting for him over at Cheney friendly establishments like the Carlyle Group.
Cheney bullied the CIA and Colin Powell into making the case for war as he toured the country convincing Americans that Saddam Hussein was behind 9/11 while feeding Judith Miller at the New York Times phony tales of Iraq being days away from dropping a nuclear bomb on us.
Cheney promised that Iraqis would greet us as liberators never grasping how much the Shiites and Sunnis despised each other and that while Hussein was evil he was at the same time keeping a tight lid on centuries of ethnic and religious hatred squeezed into a country created after World War One with geographic boundaries catering to the imperial needs of France and Great Britain and not the people who actually lived there, like Shiites and Sunnis. Iraq without Hussein was a tinderbox waiting to explode. But because Cheney flunked out of Yale he didn’t know that when you topple Iraq’s army you needed something to take its place.
Even Megyn Kelly isn’t buying it.
You don’t dismiss Saddam’s army because the last thing American troops wanted were hundreds of thousands of unemployed soldiers taking off their uniforms, keeping their weapons, and receding into the countryside to fight as insurgents. Maybe had Dick Cheney not taken 5,000 college deferments during Vietnam he would have learned that.
And so after Baghdad fell, Hussein’s disbanded army waged a guerrilla war against a very small American occupying force. Why so small? General Eric Shinseki warned Cheney before the invasion that America needed at least 500,000 soldiers to maintain security. Shinseki was immediately dismissed only to pop up later at Obama’s VA cleaning up the very mess he warned about.
When the Mission Accomplished sign came down and the insurgents rose up Cheney dismissed the Iraqi opposition as being in its “death throes.” Cheney’s war of choice dragged on with American soldiers dying because they didn’t have the proper equipment. Cheney fought Iraq on the cheap, with Humvees lacking the under armor plating that deflects the impact from a roadside bomb.
Cheney’s invasion of Iraq, without Iraq attacking or even threatening to attack America, is called a preventive war. Preventive war waged without the approval of the United Nations, which Cheney didn’t have, violates international law. Thus Dick Cheney is a war criminal.
Of course Dick Cheney isn’t America’s first war criminal. But Americans are a forgiving people, especially when their war criminals have a modicum of success. President Obama comes to mind. Americans will excuse illegal drone strikes when you’re killing Bin Laden and capturing the guy responsible for Benghazi.
Cheney took 5,000 college draft deferments during Vietnam.
But Dick Cheney failed at everything. There is not a single decision Dick Cheney can point to that he got right in Iraq. Even the surge he’s so proud of turned out to be smoke and mirrors having nothing to do with our military finally sending in more troops but more about our military handing over boatloads of cash to Sunni warlords so they would stop shooting at us.
Dick Cheney got nothing right. Yet in their Op-Ed for the Wall Street Journal what president do he and Liz say was wrong on everything? Barack Obama. The president who, before coming to Washington, publicly opposed Cheney’s invasion of Iraq.
Cheney can’t admit he’s wrong, because to admit he’s wrong, to admit that he destroyed three countries, Iraq, Afghanistan and America is a burden too heavy to bare. Plus he’s a sociopath.
Cheney would rather spend time with his new heart fly fishing, but he is surrounded by three ambitious women, his wife Lynne and two daughters who are pushing him out there to defend his record because they know that if the lie isn’t repeated over and over he will go down in history as the worst U.S. president since Jefferson Davis. I know Jefferson Davis was the Confederate president, so technically he wasn’t really president. But technically Cheney wasn’t president either.
Cheney didn’t write that article for the Wall Street Journal, his daughter Liz did. Liz is building a business in Washington D.C. as a career lobbyist pushing right wing agendas and charging a lot of money for the wisdom she absorbed sitting at her father’s feet.
Liz Cheney is burnishing her father’s reputation because Liz Cheney doesn’t have one of her own. Her calling card is being Dick Cheney’s daughter. It’s not working. As Dick Cheney’s name becomes synonymous with failure, Liz Cheney is losing power, like a Baathist general who must now fight a desperate insurgency indiscriminately firing cheap shots at our president.
Liz Cheney calling Obama “a dangerous president who is intent on weakening America” is the act of a frantic daughter who can’t handle the brutal truth that the Cheney name shall never be rehabilitated. Because the name Cheney is forever tarnished and even Republicans wish, like Iraq, it would just go away.