Friday, January 26, 2007

"Last Throes" Cheney: Same Old Dick, Same Old Tricks

Also at DKos.

"Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities."

--Voltaire

In an interview with CNN's Wolf Blitzer on Wednesday, Dick Cheney continued to insist that the things are going great guns in Iraq. In a rapidly changing world, it's comforting to see that some things stay the same, huh?

From Peter Baker of the Washington Post:
Vice President Cheney said yesterday that the administration has achieved "enormous successes" in Iraq but complained that critics and the media "are so eager to write off this effort or declare it a failure" that they are undermining U.S. troops in a war zone…

…The pressure is from some quarters to get out of Iraq," he told CNN. "If we were to do that, we would simply validate the terrorists' strategy that says the Americans will not stay to complete the task, that we don't have the stomach for the fight."

…Cheney said the administration would disregard the nonbinding resolution opposing the troop increase and suggested it undermines soldiers in a war zone. "It won't stop us," he said. "And it would be, I think, detrimental from the standpoint of the troops."

Only Dick Cheney could claim, with a straighter face than he managed to keep during Mr. Bush's recent State of the Union address, that we have achieved "enormous successes" in Iraq. Maybe he was talking about the enormous gains in his stock options in his old company Halliburton.

Only Dick Cheney, who had "other priorities in the 60s" than fight in the Vietnam conflict, and who avoided serving in a time of war by securing five draft deferments, would accuse his fellow Americans of not having the "stomach" to fight.

But Cheney's not alone in his cynical use of Orwellian rhetoric that blames critics and the media for failures of strategies and policies that he himself helped formulate, execute and support. And he's hardly the only member of the neoconservative echo choir who claims that checks, oversight or criticism of his neoconservative initiatives will be "detrimental" to the troops or "validate the terrorists' strategy."

The Cheney Republic

Not only does Cheney say that Congress "won't stop us" from escalating the war in Iraq. He appears to be creating a situation in which Congress can't stop his military/industrial gravy train from rolling into Iran.

Larisa Alexandrovna and Muriel Kane of Raw Story tell us in a recent article how Cheney's office has been manipulating America toward a war with Iran since before the Bush administration even took power.

According to Seymour Hersh of The New Yorker and others, Cheney was the U.S. official who gave the "green light" to Israel for its recent incursion into Lebanon. Once Cheney gave the thumbs-up to the operation, according to one of Hersh's sources, “…persuading Bush was never a problem, and Condi Rice was on board."

The War Drum Beat Goes On

Cheney also appears to be a key player behind our recent in air strikes in Somalia, supposedly aimed at al-Qaeda leaders but which, by best accounts, failed to kill the al-Qaeda leaders they were targeting. White House Press Secretary Tony Snow said that he was not aware of any White House consultation with Congress prior to the air strikes. I have not heard of anyone in Congress asking what the hell is going on in Somalia?

Our once mighty country is under the control of a man who is part Rasputin, part Svengali and part Machiavelli.

I can't wait to see what he tells Mr. Bush to decide next.

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Commander Jeff Huber, U.S. Navy (Retired) writes from Virginia Beach, Virginia. Read his commentaries at Pen and Sword.

11 comments:

  1. Good point, Sky. I never did either.

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  2. Anonymous2:02 PM

    Devious Dick the Grand Puppetmaster strikes again!

    Former President Eisenhower was certainly preceptive when he warned us about the dangers of a vast military-industrial complex and what might happen when someone, who knew much less about the military, occupied the Oval Office.

    Unfortunately he never envisioned someone like Cheney running the show from the Vice-President's Office.

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  3. Anonymous2:15 PM

    Thursday, January 25, 2007

    It's even better than Kos reports
    by John in DC - 1/25/2007 06:50:00 PM


    Markos reports the following, then read on because I have more and it's good:
    In an interview, Pelosi also said she was puzzled by what she considered the president's minimalist explanation for his confidence in the new surge of 21,500 U.S. troops that he has presented as the crux of a new "way forward" for U.S. forces in Iraq.

    "He's tried this two times — it's failed twice," the California Democrat said. "I asked him at the White House, 'Mr. President, why do you think this time it's going to work?' And he said, 'Because I told them it had to.' "

    Asked if the president had elaborated, she added that he simply said, " 'I told them that they had to.' That was the end of it. That's the way it is."
    Oh, it's better than that. When I was on the Hill on Tuesday, Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-FL) told us (on the record) the rest of the story. Apparently, Pelosi's final come-back to the president was the following:
    PELOSI: He's tried this two times — it's failed twice. I asked him at the White House, 'Mr. President, why do you think this time it's going to work?'

    BUSH: Because I told them it had to.

    PELOSI: Why didn't you tell them that the other two times?

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  4. Anonymous2:53 PM

    I, of course, meant perceptive not preceptive when referring to Eisenhower's view of the military-industrial complex.

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  5. Maybe we should rename the neoconservative movement, the Good News movement.

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  6. Anonymous10:40 PM

    In 2 of the 5 books I've read on the debacle Bush jokes with Jay Garner that given the 'great job' he'd done in Iraq, Bush wanted to send Garner and the 'Space Cowboys' to Iran next... Garner asked to be sent to Cuba next - prefering the excellent cigars and rum and the pretty women.

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  7. Anonymous12:18 PM

    Now they have authorized the killing of "Iranian agents" in Iraq (http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,,1999816,00.html)..
    I really dont get it, these people seem to think that the Iranians are like dumb enemies in computergames who cant shoot back. If they start hunting iranians, wait for the Quods-force to start sending "volunteer" elite teams of Iraqi exiles to hunt back. BTW, remember where the Iraqi airforce and their friends went during the first gulf war? This means that Iran has perfect logistic information. And, they are propably even welcome in Anbar if they curb in the deathsquads and aim them at the US instead. Iran also has a pretty good international intelligence network, with several "targeted killings" (Oh, dont you love newspeak!) done in Europe over the last decades. This is NOT a pushover country.

    How your top-commanders can go along with this continually developing broadening of the conflict, I dont understand. From what I hear, the equipment-situation is becoming quite thin as well. The only logical solution is that they want the conflict to escalate, in order to "create momentum" in the "campaign for universal democracy". 200000 dead human bodies, and they just continue..

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  8. Anonymous11:01 AM

    And on that note, see http://rangeragainstwar.blogspot.com for an analysis of the recent kidnapping and killing in Karbala.

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  9. Anonymous11:08 AM

    Hi, Im a friend of MK, excellent blog. Would just like to comment that I think it is time that Cheney fires George Bush. Keep on writing, build the outrage. You need to get the US public really angry, because climate change is coming, and its coming down fast, now.

    Here in Norway the whole ecosystem is changing, the fish-schools moving, icecaps disappearing. Very disturbing, especially considering the fact that what we see now is contigency-effects of (hopefully) the 70s and that things will get worse before they get better for a long hard time. New Orleans should be a good symbol for this, and Florida might just disappear.

    The best to you, keep up the good work.

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  10. MK,

    Thanks for the link.

    Fnord,

    Welcome to Pen and Sword! Stop by and comment often.

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