Sure, Cheney led you totally astray on Iraq, but why not believe him this time when he tells us all that Obama is leading to “the first use of a nuclear weapon since Hiroshima and Nagasaki.”
Republican Former Vice President Dick Cheney (of WMD infamy) appeared on CBS to hawk his new book and warn us all that this time, he is sure about the WMD. In order to save ourselves, we need to kill the Iran deal. You know, the one that world leaders say is the best thing we can get.
Speaking on CBS This Morning, Cheney said, “I think we can get a better deal.” In fact, even though world leaders have said that there would be no more going back to the table if this deal doesn’t pass, Cheney bucked that reality, “I think what you can do is, if Congress will reject the deal, which I hope they will, and override president’s veto, then you can go back to negotiating table.”
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They started off with the standard Dick Cheney-terrorizing-Americans-with-weapons-of-mass-destruction bit, as he wrote in his book, “The Obama agreement will lead to a nuclear-armed Iran, a nuclear arms race in the Middle East, and more than likely, the first use of a nuclear weapon since Hiroshima and Nagasaki.”
Like all grownups, Cheney claimed that his part of the Iraq war was a success, any failures are President Obama’s fault. In fact, Cheney has decided that the withdrawal of troops is what created the vacuum of power that led to ISIL, and he has blamed Obama for this even though he knows that the SOFA was signed when he was still in office:
“When we got through in Iraq at the end of our administration, Iraq was in good shape. We had the surge; the president made a very courageous decision in ’07 and we had ’07, ’08 where we established a coalition government in Iraq.”
Well, no, actually. And Cheney knows it. We wouldn’t have been in Iraq if it weren’t for the repeated, strategic, and deliberate lies of the Bush administration. Once there, we couldn’t get out in spite of the Mission Accomplished banners.
But it was Bush who signed the Status of Forces Agreement that agreed that we would be withdrawing our troops. The U.S. had no say in that, as ultimately Iraq wanted us gone. So we did all that we could, training the Iraqi security forces and staying on in an advise and assist mode. But vacuums were created by the invasion and they were filled by ISIL.
The book and the appearance were both obviously politically motivated, in hopes of smearing President Obama’s foreign policy by blaming him for the results of George W. Bush’s policies and then using that false construct to attack the 2016 Democratic front-runner and former Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton.
Cheney never stopped telling us all that we were going to die soon and it would be Obama’s fault, and hey, Clinton was there so blame her too — right in keeping with how Bush/Cheney managed to make the American people think Saddam Hussein was behind the attack on 9/11, in spite of the evidence to the contrary proving there was no evidence of ties between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda.
“The real challenge is going to be for Sec. Clinton to try to separate herself from what we detail in the book, very well documented set of issues, in terms of the danger that this president has put us in, and she of course was there for a large part of it.”
Yes, take it from the guy who told Rush Limbaugh on September 13, 2002:
“What’s happening, of course, is we’re getting additional information that, in fact, Hussein is reconstituting his biological, chemical, and nuclear weapons programs.” There is no such new intel.
No that was not what was happening at all. Let us revisit actual history long enough to recount that Vice President Cheney was in office and busy ignoring actual intel when the largest attack in history occurred on home soil.
So, do you want to die? You’re going to be killed imminently unless you do as Dick says. Don’t ask any questions, don’t wait for facts and never, ever verify. Don’t have an exit plan. Just start a war and wing it. That’s just how Bush/Cheney rolled.
Republicans are desperate to derail the Iran deal (which is looking better by the minute for Obama and thus the world) for a variety of reasons, not the least of which lest the contrast to their completely tragic handling of Iraq look even worse in an election year.
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