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.
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