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Cheney Rips Obama to Revise Iraq's Failure
by John M. Curtis
(310) 204-8700
Copyright
June 19, 2014
All Rights Reserved.
Ripping President Barack Obama for the mess
he created in Iraq and the U.S. economy, former Vice President Dick Cheney and
47-year-old his right-wing pundit daughter Elizabeth tried to rewrite history
again. Since leaving office exhausted in 2009 and finally getting a new lease on
life from a heart transplant May 25, 2012, Cheney’s full of the same guile the
made him the most powerful vice president in U.S. history. “Rarely has a U.S. president been so
wrong about so much at the expense of so many,” said Cheney and Liz in a Wall
Street Journal oped, blasting Obama for letting things get out of hand in Iraq. Cheney forgets that when Obama
pulled the plug on the Iraq War Dec. 15, 2011, it was Iraqi President Nouri
al-Maliki that booted the U.S. off Iraqi soil.
When Cheney talks of a president “been so wrong about so much,” he’s
referring to his boss George W. Bush.
Former President Bush took Cheney’s advice from his special neocon
friends at the Pentagon’s Office of Special Plans led by Douglas Feith Jr.,
whose wisdom insisted that the late Iraq dictator Saddam Hussein possessed
dangerous biologic and chemical weapons.
While there was nothing wrong in the wake of Sept. 11 of searching for
weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, there was something very wrong with
toppling the regime April 12, 2003 with no plan of how to restore law-and-order. Toppling Saddam fulfilled former
Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Colin Powell and former National Security
Advisor Brent Scowcroft’s fear, warning former President George H.W. Bush in
1991 to not topple Saddam in the first Gulf War.
Scowcroft and Powerll feared a dangerous power vacuum without Saddam that
would open the floodgates of Sunni Islamic extremism in Iraq.
Fast forward to Bush and Cheney’s war in Iraq that toppled Saddam, wiped
out the Iraqi military and opened Iraq’s doors to practically every Saud-backed
Sunni terror group on the planet.
After nearly nine years of war, over 4,800 deaths and over $1 trillion in wasted
tax dollars, Obama finally ended the Iraq War.
“Instead, he [Obama] abandoned Iraq and we are watching American defeat
snatched from the jaws of victory.”
Cheney knows there was no victory in Iraq, only more sectarian war between
Shiites and Sunnis. When Cheney
speaks of “victory,” he’s referring to beating back al-Qaeda and other radical
Sunni groups in what Cheney called his troop surge that dramatically jumped U.S.
death rates. In Cheney’s view, tbe
Iraq War should have never ended because of the ongoing risk of radical Islam
upending the U.S.-backed Shiite government of Nouri al-Maliki.
Watching from his armchair, Cheney sees the late Abu Musab al-Zarqawi’s
Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant’s group taking over oil-rich Mosul,
Saddam’s hometown of Tikrit and encroaching on Baghdad. Cheney takes no responsibility for
causing the mess in Iraq by toppling Saddam under false intel from his friends
at the Pentagon’s Office of Special Plans.
Cheney didn’t listen to the CIA or German Intelligence that warned him
against accepting specious intel from nefarious former Iraqi exiles about
Saddam’s arsenal of dangerous weapons.
If you give Bush and Cheney the benefit of the doubt regarding Saddam’s
alleged arsenal, it still doesn’t account for squandering over $1 trillion tax
dollars and 4,800 lives on a miscalculation.
Whatever past miscalculations, Obama must decide how much
blood-and-treasure the U.S. can continue to sacrifice in Iraq.
Cheney and his right wing pundit daughter want to ignore the Iraq War’s
catastrophic damage to the U.S. economy.
Nobel Prize-winning New York University Stern School economist Joseph I.
Stiglitz attributed the economy’s collapse in 2007-08 to unendurable spending on
the Iraq and Afghan Wars. Cheney
blames Obama for not continuing the war or at least leaving more boots on the
ground in Iraq. Cheney doesn’t
admit to damaging the military and U.S. economy.
He’s now hell-bent on blaming Obama for ISIS taking over major swaths of
Iraq. “Iraq is at risk of falling
to a radical Islamic terror group and Mr. Obama is talking climate change,” said
Cheney’s Wall Street Journal piece.
Without acknowledging how he and Bush brought Islamic extremism to Iraq, Cheney
forgets the costly and lengthy time given to al-Maliki to become strong and
self-sufficent.
Whatever went wrong with the Iraqi military, it wouldn’t have improved
with only more time and training.
After spending over $1 trillion and losing 4,800 brave Americans, the U.S.
public saw no end in sight when they backed Obama ending the Iraq War Dec. 15,
2011. Cheney’s new nonprofit “The
Alliance for a Strong America,” headed by his daughter Liz, seeks to rewrite
history and push the U.S. to continue playing the world’s policeman. While there’s nothing wrong with projecting American power, there’s something reckless
about pushing for confrontations with Russia in Ukraine, Bashar al-Assad in
Syria and Ayatollah Ali Khamenei in Iran.
Faced with an implacable challenge in Iraq, Obama can’t allow Baghdad to
fall to radical Islam, certainly not the group that massacred U.S. forces in
Iraq. Ignoring ISIS in Iraq will
only make Obama’s job tougher around the globe.
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