The Welcome Return of the Cheneys
Liz Cheney on how she and her father aim to shore up national defense
By The Welcome Return of the Cheneys
June 23, 2014
nationalreview.com
Shhh — Don’t tell anybody, because it’s a big secret: The Cheneys of Wyoming, father and daughter, were largely right about Iraq back in 2003, and they are correct now as well.
Former vice president Dick Cheney and former high-ranking State Department official Liz Cheney kicked up a predictable firestorm last week when they wrote a Wall Street Journal column blasting President Obama’s foreign and defense policies. Concurrently, they announced a new 501(c)(4) grassroots organization called The Alliance for a Strong America. This group is sure to become a target for lefty loonies and Rand Paul, who doubtless hope to trace the trail of evil money from Halliburton and other Death Star sources and expose the Alliance as a threat to the very existence of Planet Earth.
The establishment media weren’t the only ones to get a case of the vapors. Even Megyn Kelly of Fox News got into the act. “Time and again,” she said, “history has proven that you got it wrong in Iraq, sir.” With that track record, said scores of critics, how dare the Cheneys open their mouths on the subject now?
Well, it’s a darn good thing they are doing so. With American interests in tatters, it takes people of the Cheneys’ stature to force the debate beyond the media’s usual Obama-friendly platitudes. I spoke by phone with Liz Cheney last week, and she makes the case far better than I can.
Let’s consider first of all what the U.S. actually accomplished, despite a number of operational missteps, between the allied liberation of Iraq in 2003 and the end of the Bush-Cheney administration in early 2009.
“When Obama took office,” Cheney said, “what we had achieved was a stable Iraq that had a relationship with the United States that made it an ally of ours in the heart of the Middle East.” She continued:
“The threat from the radical Islamist groups such as al-Qaeda had been seriously diminished inside Iraq. If you go back and look at the statements this president said then, even though he opposed the surge, he admitted in effect that we had succeeded beyond his wildest dreams. You no longer had a situation where you had to worry either that the government of Iraq was going to give aid to terrorists or that terrorist groups would have a foothold — a safe haven — inside Iraq. As of 2009, that was the situation. Those conditions clearly were beneficial and important to our national security.
“There were other benefits as well: You have to look first at the fact that when we went into Iraq, very shortly thereafter Moammar Qaddafi turned over the Libyan nuclear program. Clearly, that was a result of Qaddafi’s thinking he might be next. It doesn’t take much imagination to see what the threat would have been to us if Libya had nuclear weapons.
“We also were in a position at that point where our friends and allies could count on us, where they knew our word meant something.”
Cheney also could have pointed out that Qaddafi’s fear of sharing Saddam Hussein’s fate probably motivated him to turn over vast stores of other weapons and to cooperate for half a decade with American intelligence efforts, including the significant help Qaddafi provided in breaking up the A. Q. Khan nuclear network. The United States remains far safer because of these achievements.
Meanwhile, other republican “revolutions,” including those known as Orange (Ukraine), Rose (Georgia), and Cedar (Lebanon) — all partially inspired by the liberation of Iraq — won notable early successes. With a dose of luck and skill, these uprisings, early on, had a real chance of moving these regions toward greater democratization.
The Bush-Cheney foreign policy also tremendously degraded al-Qaeda worldwide, forged close alliances with Eastern European nations such as Poland, and significantly improved conditions in some South and Central American nations, most notably Colombia.
That said, what does Cheney believe Obama should do now, as the terrorist group ISIS grabs huge swaths of Iraqi territory?
She advised that Obama take an action that, coincidentally, he in fact announced (in large part) just 90 minutes after I spoke with Cheney: the insertion of a limited number of American personnel, not as ground troops, but, as Cheney puts it, “to give al-Maliki the intelligence he needs, and planners who can help him plan the military campaign against ISIS, and probably Special Forces to help with training and help commanders of the Iraqi army so they can begin to get folks back on the offense.”
part I
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Poster Comment:
jimmy CarterII ...
America can survive really bad presidents ---
the rest of the world can't !
