Dick Cheney: ‘We were right’ to invade Iraq
09/01/15 02:43 PM
By Zachary Roth
Dick Cheney just won’t let it go.
In a new book, the former vice president mounts a furious assault against President Obama’s foreign policy, which
Cheney argues has damaged American security by retreating from a position of global leadership.
And Cheney takes the obligatory shot at former Secretary of State
Hillary Clinton over the deadly attack on a U.S. diplomatic post in
Benghazi, Libya. But
Cheney often seems more concerned with defending the disastrous foreign policy decisions of the Bush administration—from invading Iraq to the use of torture—made more than a decade ago.
In “Exceptional: Why the World Needs a Powerful America,” Cheney,
writing with his daughter Liz Cheney, a former State Department official
during the Bush administration, takes aim at the Obama administration’s
nuclear deal with Iran, writing it will “guarantee an Iranian nuclear
arsenal.” The Cheneys insist that invading Iraq was the right call,
writing “things were in good shape” in the country when Obama took
office. Oh, and they suggest that National Security Agency leaker Edward
Snowden was probably a Russian spy.
Almost the first half of
the book is devoted to defending Dick Cheney’s tarnished legacy as
perhaps the most important figure in the Bush administration’s push for
war in Iraq and its handling of the war on terror.
At one stage, the Cheneys write that “history will be the ultimate
judge of our decision to liberate Iraq.” But just two pages later, as if
unable to resist re-engaging the issue, they describe the late Iraqi
president Saddam Hussein as a “grave threat to the United States” before
concluding: “
We were right to invade and remove him from power.”
They even insist that U.S. troops “were in fact greeted as
liberators,” just as Dick Cheney predicted before the invasion—a quote
that Bush administration critics have frequently hung around his neck.
The Cheneys also offer a strained rationale for why, even though
Hussein had nothing to do with 9/11, the terror attacks still were a
reason to invade Iraq. “[A]fter 9/11 … we had an obligation to do
everything possible to prevent terrorists from gaining access to much
worse weapons. Saddam’s Iraq was the most likely place for terrorists to
gain access to and knowledge of such weapons.”
As for the Bush administration’s enhanced interrogation program, “it
worked,” the Cheneys write. “As we pieced together intelligence about al
Qaeda in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, the enhanced interrogation
program was one of the most effective tools we had. It saved lives and
prevented attacks.”
And, they claim, it’s a “falsehood” to say that the torture that
occurred at the Abu Ghraib prison “represented official policy,” or “had
something to do with or was related to America’s enhanced interrogation
program.”
The prison at Guantanamo Bay “was and remains safe, secure, humane and necessary,” according to the Cheneys.
And people who oppose the Bush administration’s controversial
warrantless wiretapping program “will be accountable for explaining to
the American people why they fought to make it more difficult for the
United States government to effectively track the communications—and
therefore the plans—of terrorists inside the United States,” they write.
Still, the thrust of the book is an attack on Obama’s foreign policy,
which, the Cheneys argue, has made the U.S. less safe by failing to
wield American power around the globe.
“President Obama has departed from the bipartisan tradition going
back 75 years of maintaining America’s global supremacy and leadership,”
the Cheneys write, calling the idea that that “America is to blame and
her power must be restrained” the “touchstone of [Obama’s] ideology.”
With the Iran nuclear deal, Obama “is gambling America’s security on
the veracity of the Mullahs in Tehran,” they write, calling it a
“falsehood” that the pact will prevent Iran from getting a nuclear
weapon. “The truth is the opposite,” they write. “This agreement will
guarantee an Iranian nuclear arsenal.”
Indeed, the Cheneys compare the deal to the Munich agreement of 1938,
a frequently used example among conservatives of the dangers of
appeasement.
“
Hitler got Czechoslovakia,” the Cheneys write (in fact, at Munich,
Hitler
got the Sudetenland, an area of western Czechoslovakia mostly inhabited
by German speakers). “The Mullahs in Tehran get billions of dollars and
a pathway to a nuclear arsenal.”
The Cheneys also take the chance to go after Clinton on Benghazi, in
an effort to reinforce questions about her character as she runs for the
2016 Democratic presidential nomination. They accuse her of “adopting a
false narrative because it serves political purposes,” adding, “It is
the difference between lying to the American people and dealing with
them truthfully.”
Dick Cheney also recounts that a Pentagon official told him in a
phone call that the administration’s “pivot to Asia” was “all about
budgets.” From this Cheney writes: “President Obama was pretending the
war on terror was over so that he wouldn’t have to continue to allocate
significant military resources to the Middle East.”
“We’ll decline comment on second-hand anonymous quotes, but the
President has been clear about the re-balance and its place in our
national security. The re-balance to the Asia-Pacific region is based on
a comprehensive assessment of long-term U.S. interests,” Defense
Department spokesman William Urban told msnbc. “The security and
prosperity of the United States depends on continued stability in the
Asia-Pacific region, and therefore, the United States will stay fully
engaged in the region to ensure that we continue to promote those
interests.”
Perhaps the strangest charge in the book is the one about Snowden,
the former NSA contractor who leaked a trove of classified documents
before fleeing to Hong Kong, and, ultimately, Russia.
“Whether Snowden was a Russian operative at the time he stole the
U.S. secrets is a subject of debate, although it is hard to conceive of
his landing in Moscow as a coincidence,” the Cheneys write. Snowden has
denied being a Russian spy.
