Tornado Alley (PROG)

[Susie924]

Lupica: 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.

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.

http://www.nydailynews.com/news/politics/lupica-dick-cheney-iraq-mess-article-1.1835597