Dick Cheney and the Dark Side

Dick Cheney, who died in November, was by far the most powerful U.S. Vice President in history, and not coincidentally, was one of the Americans who most harmed the United States (and the world) in living memory. That ignominious club includes Newt Gingrich, Mitch McConnell, Donald Trump, Ronald Reagan and Richard Nixon, and although it's arguable who's done the most damage, Cheney's lasting legacy is overwhelming negative and dark. Although George W. Bush bears ultimate responsibility for the decisions he made and the many he abdicated to Cheney during their administration, and Cheney had many allies who also deserve blame, Cheney was the driving force behind many if not all of the Bush administration's multiple disasters, horrible policies and frankly evil actions. And although Dick Cheney criticized Trump and even voted against him in 2024, many of the Trump administration's illegal assertions of monarchial power – and certainly its contempt for due process – were proudly modeled by the Bush-Cheney regime.

Cheney pushed for a war of choice in Iraq, an inherently unconscionable action even if it hadn't turned out disastrously. He shamelessly deceived Congress, reporters and the American people to sell that war. He, his friend Donald Rumsfeld, and others allies created a torture regime, one of the darkest stains on the United States. He fought against due process, and for indefinite detention. He supported warrantless surveillance of American citizens. He pushed for not one but two budget-busting tax cuts for the rich, knowing they were fiscally irresponsible and despite the already extreme wealth inequality in the United States. He fought against disclosure, oversight and accountability. He seeded the government with his lackeys and allowed the politicization of the civil service. The Bush administration made a staggering number of decisions that were bad for America, in large part because Cheney and his team arrogantly assumed they were always correct and actively undermined the checks, balances, discussions and dissents that allow for good decision making.

It's not possible to cover every failing of Dick Cheney in detail in one post. The best book on Cheney I've found is Angler by Barton Gellman, which expanded on a Pulitzer-winning series by Jo Becker and Gellman. I also think it's one of the best books for understanding the Bush administration as a whole, along with The Dark Side by Jane Mayer, which adeptly and chillingly chronicles the Bush administration's torture program, championed by Cheney and others. Mayer's book expanded on her reporting for The New Yorker and fed into the excellent Frontline episode "The Dark Side." Another episode, "Cheney's Law," is very good at looking at Cheney specifically, and the Frontline archive on the Iraq War is both comprehensive and damning. Most of my posts involving Cheney can be found in one or more of the categories Cheney, Bush, torture, Iraq, war and the war series. My fellow bloggers have certainly penned plenty as well. In the meantime, we'll try to recount some of Dick Cheney's most despicable legacies below.

The Iraq War

Simply stated, there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction.
- Dick Cheney, August 26th, 2002.

We will, in fact, be greeted as liberators.
– Dick Cheney, March 16th, 2003.

I think they're in the last throes, if you will, of the insurgency.
- Dick Cheney, June 30th, 2005.

Jim Lehrer: You drew a lot of heat and ridicule when you said eight months ago, insurgency is in its last throes. You regret having said that?

Cheney: No. I think the way I think about it, as I just described. I think about when we look back and get some historical perspective on this period, I'll believe that the period we were in through 2005 was in fact a turning point, that putting in place a democratic government in Iraq was the, sort of the cornerstone, if you will, of victory against the insurgency.
- February 7th, 2006.

I don't think anybody anticipated the level of violence that we've encountered.
- Dick Cheney, June 20th, 2005.

"War is hell" is a cliché that happens to be true. War entails death and destruction, pain and suffering, and often involves dismemberment, disfigurement, sexual assault, post-traumatic stress disorder, and other ills. At best, war is a necessary evil, and you should be wary of anyone who wants to go to war. Starting an unnecessary war, a war of choice, is inherently immoral, and lying and misleading others to start such a war is likewise immoral. The Iraq War officially started in 2003 and ended in 2011, and was largely a disaster. I have a 20th anniversary roundup providing retrospectives and useful links, some which bear repeating directly here. As of this writing, the Cost of War project estimates that the "cost of the post-9/11 wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Syria, and elsewhere totals about $8 trillion. This does not include future interest costs on borrowing for the wars." The Pew Research Center has a superb piece called "A Look Back at How Fear and False Beliefs Bolstered U.S. Public Support for War in Iraq" (3/14/23). See also the National Security Archive's pieces that the public relations push for the Iraq war preceded intelligence findings, Britain's Downing Street memo that stated that the Bush administration's "intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy" of going to war, Mother Jones' "Lie by Lie: A Timeline of How We Got Into Iraq" (September 2006), and a similar piece from The Center for Public Integrity, "False Pretenses" (1/23/08).

Dick Cheney was one of the most ardent advocates for war with Iraq and one of the most unconscionable about selling it. In one particularly infamous appearance on Meet the Press, Cheney claimed that Iraqi President Saddam Hussein had reconstituted Iraq's nuclear weapons program, and pointed to The New York Times as independently supporting his claims, when in fact he had fed those very claims to New York Times reporters Judith Miller and Michael R. Gordon. (FAIR has some excellent pieces on this and related incidents, including "Iraq and the Media: A Critical Timeline" [3/19/07] and the retrospective "20 Years Later, NYT Still Can’t Face Its Iraq War Shame" [3/22/23].) As the above quotations show, Cheney not only sold bullshit and delusion, but refused to acknowledge the reality of the disaster in Iraq.

Cheney also relied heavily on bigotry and American ignorance of Middle Eastern history and politics. To quote from an older post, "Giddy Minds and Foreign Quarrels" (11/11/09):

Bush officials, Cheney most of all, were going around conflating 9/11 and Al Qaeda with one of bin Laden's regional enemies, Saddam Hussein in Iraq. While many of the pre-war assertions were noteworthy for their bullshit factor, one of the most amazing came from Dick Cheney on Meet the Press in September 2003, after the Iraq War had been going roughly six months:

"If we're successful in Iraq . . . then we will have struck a major blow right at the heart of the base, if you will, the geographic base of the terrorists who had us under assault now for many years, but most especially on 9/11."

Honestly, this is one of the most bigoted, fear-mongering, deceptive and unconscionable statements I've ever seen from a high-ranking official. I've covered it before, but note that not only does Cheney indirectly suggest that Iraq was responsible for 9/11, he uses “geographic base” to conflate all Middle Eastern countries (or at least our “enemies”) and all of their inhabitants. This would be like invading Australia because of David Hicks[, an Australian who joined Al Qaeda]. Presumably Cheney's "geographic base" would include the country that produced most of the 9/11 terrorists – our erstwhile ally, Saudi Arabia. But really, who can really tell all those Middle Eastern people apart? Plus, they look and talk so funny. (It's often been quipped that invading Iraq after 9/11 was like attacking Mexico after Pearl Harbor.)

We'd also be wise to remember the incompetence and corruption of the Bush-Cheney administration in Iraq. As chronicled well in the documentary No End in Sight and elsewhere, when it came to Iraq, competent, career civil servants were overridden in favor of unqualified ideologues and loyalists. Historically, the U.S. has done very well at infrastructure projects, and reconstruction in Iraq should have gone well. But the Bush administration gave huge contracts to companies that often did shoddy work. The most glaring of these was probably Halliburton, formerly led by Dick Cheney. Cheney received a $36 million severance package from Halliburton, had stock options in the company, and received almost $400,000 in deferred compensation while Vice President. Halliburton in turn received a $7 billion no-bid contract for work in Iraq. It didn't take long for Halliburton to pull shady moves, and chief contracting officer Bunny Greenhouse, a long-time civil servant with an exemplary record, blew the whistle on the company. In response, the Bush-Cheney administration demoted her. Halliburton's record in Iraq was notable for routinely overcharging the U.S. government, including a $108 million overcharge for fuel and overcharging for food at one camp alone by $16 million over a seven-month period. (See also "Dick Cheney and the Making of Halliburton," a lengthy excerpt from Jeffrey St. Clair’s 2005 book on war-profiteering, Grand Theft Pentagon.) A 5/16/07 NPR piece, "What Went Wrong with the Rebuilding of Iraq?" is a useful reminder of how bad the situation was (emphasis added):

Thousands of reconstruction contracts were awarded. And there was plenty of money to go around, including an initial $18 billion appropriated by Congress. Another $20 billion was available from the so-called Development Fund for Iraq — money that was derived from, among other things, Iraqi oil sales. Federal investigations have found that the money was quickly spent, with little planning or accounting.

It was a free-for-all climate best demonstrated when Paul Bremer, the head of the Coalition Provisional Authority, successfully requested that $12 billion in cash be shipped to Iraq. U.S. Rep. Henry Waxman (D-CA), now chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, said he was astonished when he heard about it.

"It's hard even now to imagine $12 billion in hundred-dollar bills, wrapped into bricklike bundles, then put on huge pallets and brought over by troop carrier airplanes to be dispersed in a war zone," Waxman said.

"We have no idea where that money went. Of the $12 billion, $8.8 billion is unaccounted for," he said.

Bremer defended his action, suggesting it was naïve to try to impose Western-style accounting practices in Iraq during a war. Several investigations led by Stuart Bowen, the special inspector-general for Iraq reconstruction, have found that the reconstruction effort was riddled with waste, fraud, corruption and shoddy construction. Bowen told NPR's All Things Considered about one particularly bad construction site he investigated — a $75 million police training academy built by Parsons Corp.

"Essentially, when they put in the plumbing, they had no fittings, so they just joined plumbing pipes, cemented them together," he said. "The connections burst once they started to be used, and the sewage thus leaked from the bathrooms down through the building — and into light fixtures and through the ceilings."

Urine and feces dripping into lights and from the ceiling is an apt metaphor for the Bush-Cheney administration's performance in Iraq, but unfortunately, it inflicted an even worse legacy.

Torture

We also have to work, though, sort of the dark side, if you will. We've got to spend time in the shadows in the intelligence world. A lot of what needs to be done here will have to be done quietly, without any discussion, using sources and methods that are available to our intelligence agencies, if we're going to be successful. That's the world these folks operate in, and so it's going to be vital for us to use any means at our disposal, basically, to achieve our objective.
– Dick Cheney on Meet the Press, 9/16/01

Dick Cheney was one of the most zealous proponents for torture in the Bush administration, certainly at his level of power. Wannabe tough guys believe that torture can force someone to tell the truth, but the experts know that torture is only effective at inflicting pain, sowing fear, and eliciting false confessions. The U.S. has scholars, military personnel, and intelligence agents who are fully aware of this, and some sounded the warning about torture to the Bush administration. But torture is about getting the answer the torturer wants to hear versus the truth, and similarly, the Bush-Cheney administration didn't want to acknowledge the truth about torture.

Most of the U.S. media and Congress was and remains reluctant to confront how monstrous the torture regime was, and also how it was used politically. A short piece by Paul Krugman on 4/22/09 summed up a key aspect:

From Jonathan Landay at McClatchy, one of the few reporters to get the story right during the march to war:

The Bush administration put relentless pressure on interrogators to use harsh methods on detainees in part to find evidence of cooperation between al Qaida and the late Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein’s regime, according to a former senior U.S. intelligence official and a former Army psychiatrist.

Such information would’ve provided a foundation for one of former President George W. Bush’s main arguments for invading Iraq in 2003. No evidence has ever been found of operational ties between Osama bin Laden’s terrorist network and Saddam’s regime.

The use of abusive interrogation — widely considered torture — as part of Bush’s quest for a rationale to invade Iraq came to light as the Senate issued a major report tracing the origin of the abuses and President Barack Obama opened the door to prosecuting former U.S. officials for approving them.

Let’s say this slowly: the Bush administration wanted to use 9/11 as a pretext to invade Iraq, even though Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11. So it tortured people to make them confess to the nonexistent link.

There’s a word for this: it’s evil.

To recap and rebut the apologia for torture we heard from the Bush-Cheney administration and their allies at the time, I'll quote at some length from one of my more comprehensive posts on the subject, "Torture Versus Freedom" (5/15/09):

Defending torture insistently means one's moral compass is pointing straight down to hell. I continue to believe it's essential to confront the dangerous and evil lie that torture "works" and that we're all going to die if we respect human rights, follow the law, or dare to investigate - let alone prosecute - the people responsible for these horribly shameful and criminal policies. However, as many have noted, that we are "debating" torture's usefulness at all means we've failed somehow as a society. As Scott Horton quipped in December 2008, "Perhaps for Christmas proper we’ll be treated to arguments for and against genocide, and on the fourth day of Christmas we’ll read the arguments for and against the practice of infanticide."

While specific false claims about torture and the Bush administration's conduct should be challenged, it's especially important to emphasize torture's immorality and its clear illegality. Torture is the very antithesis of freedom. The key dynamics are not truth, security or patriotism. They are power, dehumanization and sadism. As Rear Admiral John Hutson observed, "torture is the method of choice of the lazy, the stupid and the pseudo-tough." When someone is tortured, it means that someone else in a position of power over the victim has deliberately chosen to inflict significant pain and suffering on a fellow human being. Torture spreads and corrupts in a democracy. Not only do torturers often not recognize the truth even when it's told to them, sometimes the torturers get so carried away they don't "even bother to ask questions" and "torture becomes an end unto itself." As Soviet-era torture victim Vladimir Bukovsky put it, "Why run the risk of unleashing a fury that even Stalin had problems controlling?" He also explains how, after several days of torture, "neither the doctor nor those guards could ever look me in the eye again." (See also The Lucifer Effect.)

These abuses have often resulted in permanent or serious physical and psychological damage (although torturers often prefer methods that hide the abuse they've inflicted). Torture is assault of the most cruel variety, robbing the victim of the sanctity of his or her own body, but also his or her very mind and soul. These are not actions to weigh lightly, tactics to endorse or excuse cavalierly, nor damages to forgive quickly before we even know precisely what was done. It's hard to imagine a more clear moral line.

Torture is (1) immoral, (2) illegal, (3) endangers us (especially American troops in the Middle East), and (4) doesn't "work" – unless one wants to inflict pain, terrorize the populace, produce bogus intelligence or elicit false confessions. It's not that torture never produces a true statement, but at best, torture "works" much the same way amputation "cures" all hand ailments. (That's still probably far too generous.) Experienced interrogators know that torture is unreliable and counterproductive in addition to being cruel and illegal. For obtaining reliable information, more humane, rapport-building techniques are far more effective. Furthermore, as John Sifton has pointed out, intel from prisoners typically grows "stale" quickly, and "if you’re relying on interrogations for intelligence, you’re already on the back foot. You’ve already lost the war, so to speak." Regardless, a skilled, experienced interrogator pursuing accurate information would not be approaching a prisoner asking, "How much pain can I legally inflict?" That is a self-defeating, dangerous path that leads all too easily to becoming "the enemies of all humankind."

Almost every excuse from Bush officials and their allies fits somewhere in the following pattern of descending denials: We did not torture; waterboarding is not torture; even if it is torture, it was legal; even if it was illegal, it was necessary; even if it was unnecessary, it was not our fault. Almost every new document and piece of information has exposed lies, deception and crippling inconsistencies in their self-ennobling but accountability-denying tale. The existing evidence does not support a "good faith" defense, but even if it did, an investigation would still be required by law. Anti-torture laws exist in large part to protect all of us from men and women so certain of their own righteousness or need that they torture others (normally until the tortured person says exactly what they want to hear - apparently, precisely what happened here). The "debate" on torture and specific abusive techniques are stalling tactics by torture proponents and apologists, who consistently favor fantasy over reality in their arguments, and want to prevent a full investigation or trial. They will discuss Jack Bauer and hypothetical ticking time bombs endlessly, but not Maher Arar or Binyam Mohamed (among many others). They typically ignore altogether such damning, central evidence as the Red Cross report, which stated authoritatively and unequivocally that prisoners in U.S. custody were tortured. Their specific denials shift depending on their audience, but they almost always ignore that for years we have tortured, abused and imprisoned innocent people. It's much easier to abuse people or justify their abuse, of course, if they're all viewed as guilty, dangerous, alien or subhuman. These practices have often resulted in significant, lasting physical and psychological damage - and even death. (That's not to mention their central role in selling the war in Iraq and the consequences of that.) Ignoring or outright lying about this level of cruelty and abuse embodies the banality and audacity of evil.

(The end of the post links multiple resources on torture.)

After Barack Obama was elected, Dick Cheney still continued to lie about torture, claiming it saved lives but also that he and other members of the Bush administration weren't responsible for the abuses at Abu Ghraib prison and elsewhere (which included over one hundred deaths). Although his daughter Liz Cheney joined him in opposing Donald Trump's reelection and did conduct herself admirably during investigative hearings into the January 6th, 2020 insurrection, it's important to remember how awful Liz Cheney has been otherwise, including a utterly despicable 2009 campaign by her and Bill Kristol attacking due process itself and accusing people trying to bring prisoners to trial after years of confinement of being terrorist sympathizers. (For years, the Cheney family essentially argued that if you tried to hold Dick Cheney and his associates responsible for their actions, terrorists would kill you in your beds.)

Due Process

The Bush-Cheney administration repeatedly ignored due process – a cornerstone of civilization – and it and its allies often attacked the people fighting for the basic rule of law as terrorist sympathizers or terrorists. The Bush-Cheney administration asserted that it could simply accuse someone of being a terrorist, not provide any proof, and could imprison or "detain" that person indefinitely. (Oh, and confessions obtained through torture were admissible evidence.) The authoritarianism of all that should be glaring and troubling. It also bears mentioning that the Bush-Cheney administration was incompetent, and seemingly didn't care if innocents were imprisoned, tortured, or killed. McClatchy did a series called Guantanamo: Beyond the Law that found, of the more than 770 terrorist suspects held at the Guantanamo Bay prison, dozens and perhaps hundreds of them were innocent. Nonetheless, innocent Mohammed Akhtiar was held for three years, a nightmare situation. The Bush-Cheney administration also kidnapped and tortured Maher Arar, an innocent Canadian-Syrian citizen (the torture was outsourced to Syria in his case). Innocent Dilawar Dilawar was captured and beaten to death at the U.S.'s Bagram air base in Afghanistan, as chronicled in the Oscar-winning documentary Taxi to the Dark Side. Besides common sense and a moral compass, there were plenty of reasons not to defer to the assertions of the Bush-Cheney administration that it was both infallible and should not be challenged.

A 2008 piece, "Using Justice Against Us," looked at the hack arguments of John Yoo against due process, most of all his attempt to get his audience to ignore that he hadn't proven that the Guantanamo prisoners actually were terrorists, and that giving them the trials Yoo opposed would be the normal way to establish any actual guilt. Dick Cheney, Liz Cheney, and many of their colleagues and allies often made similar arguments. You can read the piece for more detail, but it includes a relevant passage from lawyer Scott Horton about the 2008 court decision about Salim Hamdan, a prisoner at Guantanamo. Horton contrasts the Bush-Cheney approach with an American tradition of due process and justice:

The Bush Administration could have handled this matter in the tradition that the nation’s greatest modern attorney general, Robert Jackson, set out at Nuremberg. Jackson personally took charge of the first prosecutions, delivering mesmerizing opening and closing statements and a dramatic cascade of evidence that targeted some of the most heinous criminals from the Second World War. Jackson had two important objectives before he reached the question of the guilt or innocence of the individual defendants: he needed to validate the fairness of the process, and he needed to demonstrate, clearly and convincingly in the eyes of the world, that heinous crimes had been committed which justified this extraordinary tribunal process. Jackson accomplished both goals. He also secured the conviction of key kingpins in the Nazi terror state. He did it all within the first year of the Allied occupation of Germany, through a process that helped transform the German people from enemies to friends. In the end, Jackson and his team demonstrated that the American tradition of justice was a potent tool to be wielded against the nation’s enemies.

By contrast, America has now endured seven years of an administration which fears the rule of law, which operates in the shadows as it contravenes criminal statutes and long-cherished traditions and retaliates mercilessly against civil servants who stand for law and principle. George Bush and his political advisors openly castigate law and justice as weaknesses or vulnerabilities–as public suspicions grow that they have darker reasons to be concerned about the law. Instead of following the historic route and using military commissions that follow the nation’s long-standing traditions, they have crafted embarrassing kangaroo courts. When the Supreme Court brought its gavel down on one of their shameful contraptions, they simply concocted another, equally shameful one, openly proclaiming an inferior brand of justice for those who were "not citizens," exalting in the right to use torture-extracted evidence and to transact the proceedings in secret.

The Bush-Cheney administration's contempt for due process can also be seen in its warrantless surveillance program, which completely ignored the Fourth Amendment, among other protections. Dick Cheney and his aide David Addington were some of the most strident proponents of the program, and in 2007, former Deputy Attorney General James Comey gave vivid testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee about Bush-Cheney officials Alberto Gonzales and Andrew Card being sent to bully Attorney General John Ashcroft in his hospital bed to renew the program. (Ashcroft, despite being extremely conservative, admirably stuck to principles and refused to do so, and pointed to Comey as the acting attorney general.)

An added tidbit: Angler author Barton Gellman read Cheney's memoir, and makes a convincing case that Cheney's account of the incident, that Ashcroft said he would renew the program before Gonzales and Card came over, is a lie. Also, "the relationship between Cheney and Bush, who was unaware of the Justice Department’s objections to the program until the last minute, was never the same . . . [Gellman says it was] 'the day the president of the United States discovered that the vice president’s zeal could lead him off a cliff.' "

Plutocracy

Reagan proved deficits don’t matter. We won the midterms. This is our due.
– Dick Cheney to Secretary of the Treasury Paul O'Neill in 2002, as recounted in The Price of Loyalty by Ron Suskind.

The U.S. conservative playbook since at least Reagan has been to increase military spending and funnel money to the rich, increasing both the national deficit and the national debt, and then claim that it's necessary to cut the social safety net to balance the budget. This strategy even has a name: "starving the beast." As we've covered in other posts, Reagan did it, and the Trump tax bill was likewise an abomination meant mainly to benefit those who were already wealthy. George W. Bush had two rounds of tax cuts, in 2001 and 2003, which mostly benefitted the rich. Even Bush didn't see the reason for the 2003 cuts and his Secretary of the Treasury at the time, Paul O'Neill, also opposed them. But Cheney (and Karl Rove, among others) pushed for them, and ultimately they got their way. Cheney was smart enough to know that the 2003 cuts (and the 2001 cuts) were fiscally irresponsible and bad for Americans as a whole, but still chose to funnel more money to the wealthy (including himself) in a country with already awful wealth inequality. He chose ideology and class warfare (by the rich) over good policy.

The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities is one of the better sites for budget analysis, and wrote many posts about the Bush budgets and tax cuts. "Critics Still Wrong on What’s Driving Deficits in Coming Years" (6/28/10) provided an analysis of the deficit causes (mostly the Bush tax cuts) and rebutted false claims from the conservative Heritage Foundation that the causes were Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. "Economic Downturn and Legacy of Bush Policies Continue to Drive Large Deficits" (2/28/13) updated some data and provided an updated chart of the drivers of public debt:

"The Legacy of the 2001 and 2003 "Bush” Tax Cuts" (10/23/17) noted that the cuts did not boost economic growth as conservatives claimed would happen, and the post also provided a handy chart of who the tax cuts benefited:

Virtually every Republican, nominally "conservative" national political figure of the past 30 years has likewise championed policies to make the United States into even more of a plutocracy. That certainly applies to both Dick and Liz Cheney. They're not unique in that respect, but it bears pointing out that rather than serving the public, they have served Mammon, their rich donors, and themselves.

(Some of my more thorough posts on wealth inequality and conservative tax policies [and their extremity] are "Attack of the Plutocrats" (7/18/10), "Tax Cuts to the Rich Don't Raise Revenues" (10/26/10) and "Extremism in Defense of Nihilism Is a Vice" (7/28/11).

Monarchial Powers for the President

Americans who graduated from elementary school might remember that the United States of America was founded due to a revolution against the abuses of a monarch. College-level courses will go into much more depth and nuance (and the hypocrisies of America's founding), but nonetheless, the idea that "all men are created equal" is a powerful, stirring one, and in direct opposition to the notion of aristocratic or dictatorial rule.

The more zealous proponents of the "unitary executive theory" lack the understanding of an attentive elementary school student, preferring instead the batshit theory that America's founding fathers wanted the U.S. president to have unchecked, monarchial powers, or as Donald Trump put it, "I have the right to do whatever I want as president."

Angler has the best account I've found on Cheney's views on presidential power. Reagan and many of his top officials should have gone to jail for the Iran-Contra Affair, but in Congress' report on the affair, Cheney and his aide David Addington wrote the dissenting opinion, and asserted that Reagan and his team had unchecked power, as the founding fathers intended. To support this argument, they cherry-picked passages from The Federalist, demonstrating scholarship so grotesquely crappy and nakedly self-serving that it'd receive a failing grade from any competent professor and uproarious laughter from any non-authoritarians if the consequences weren't so dire.

If you can't get your hands on a copy of Angler, the Frontline episode "Cheney's Law" is a good resource, as is a supplemental page of interviews. (Historian Rick Perlstein is also planning to cover the Cheney-Addington Iran-Contra arguments in a future book.)

Cheney's cherry-picking wasn't limited to the office of the U.S. President; he also practiced it for his own job. Cheney claimed he didn't have to comply with National Archive requests for materials because the Vice President has duties in both the executive and legislative branches, and therefore, somehow, rather than having obligations to both branches and their rules, he was subject to neither. (Obviously, the founding fathers intended that the VP should be an unaccountable political figure.)

A Negative, Dark Legacy

I suspect that Dick Cheney convinced himself that every questionable or flatly illegal action he took was for the good of the country, even those that personally benefitted him. But for all its flaws, the U.S. government was set up in the Constitution to have a set of checks and balances. And on a good team, good ideas can survive scrutiny and discussion. They don't require lies, misrepresentation, or hiding. The torture program was evil. Starting an unnecessary war, a war of choice, was evil. Using deception to sell the war was evil. Ignoring due process was evil. Attacking the patriotism of war skeptics and the stewards of due process was despicable. Making wealth inequality in the U.S. worse is unconscionable. Asserting that the U.S. President should have monarchial powers is anti-historical and dangerous. Dick Cheney's legacy is overwhelmingly a negative, dark, evil one. (If the word "evil" makes you uncomfortable, substitute "extremely harmful" or another term.) Cheney is not someone to be lauded and not a model to follow; he is a cautionary tale. He was convinced he was correct and had atrocious judgment. He fought, often viciously, to have his way, and we Americans and the world are the worse for it.

The Iraq War in 2023

The 20th anniversary of the beginning of the Iraq War was earlier this year in March, so the war seems like a fitting subject for this Armistice Day or Remembrance Day or Veterans Day. My 10th anniversary Iraq War post, "The Dogs of War," was pretty comprehensive and there's not much I'd add to it, especially if we include my other posts on Iraq, the war series and torture. It's worth looking at some old and more recent pieces.

I recently rewatched two of the best documentaries on the subject, both from 2007. No End in Sight meticulously explores why the U.S. occupation of Iraq went so badly, all the more powerful because most of the interview subjects who chronicle the debacle were conservatives and Republicans serving the Bush administration. Taxi to the Dark Side, which won the Oscar for Best Documentary Feature, is an excellent and chilling primer on the Bush administration's torture regime.

PBS' Frontline did a number of excellent episodes on the Iraq War and the Bush Administration, including a few good piece on torture. This list rounds up many of the best episodes, and this topic page has almost everything related to Iraq.

James Fallows, who wrote numerous excellent articles on Iraq before and during the war, wrote yet another fine piece this March, "The Iraq War and Modern Memory." He also links some other retrospectives, and some of his past, key pieces on Iraq. Alternatively, you can also read some of his best contemporaneous articles in the book compilation, Blind Into Baghdad.

Via Fallows, Responsible Statecraft hosted a symposium asking the question, aside from Bush and Cheney, who is at fault for the Iraq War? Some of the choices are silly – and presumably the question also includes Rumsfeld by default, otherwise he'd be the obvious next choice – but a number of respondents make good picks that news junkies from the era probably know but the general public likely doesn't.

Driftglass and Blue Gal had a good podcast episode in their "No Fair Remembering Stuff" series back in March, "Iraq War and Remembrance." This year, they also featured Charlie Pierce's 2014 epic condemnation of Bill Kristol for being a war ghoul.

The PBS NewsHour did a few Iraq retrospectives. One piece interviewed some American Iraq War veterans. The most interesting piece interviewed Iraqis. (The PBS site also has an 2021 AP article that ran after Colin Powell's death, "Iraqis still blame Powell for role in Iraq war.") A timeline of the war piece has some use, but because it only starts when the actual war commenced, it omits significant events, including the fact that Saddam Hussein relented and allowed weapons inspectors into Iraq, but the Bush administration invaded anyway (which Bush later lied about and the press rarely challenged). I was disappointed overall by a Iraq War conversation with Paul Wolfowitz, Charles Duelfer and Vali Nasr, because the segment didn't deal at all with the Bush administration lying to the public and Congress to start the war – Wolfowitz is allowed to present going to war as a good faith exercise. He even defends disbanding the Iraqi army without pushback, despite widespread agreement that disbandment was one of the worst, most crippling decisions by the Bush administration about Iraq after invading, causing endless ongoing problems. (No End in Sight covers this in depth.) No one in the Bush administration has even ever acknowledged who actually gave the order (Wolfowitz has been floated as a candidate). Interviewer Amna Nawaz did allow Nasr the last word, though:

It's important to think about the fact that, had this war as Ambassador Wolfowitz suggested, been conducted differently after we entered into Iraq, had we left a different legacy there, the question of the reasons we went in would not loom as large as they do right now.

When we continuously debate reasons why we went in and question the motivations of going in, it's almost we are admitting to the fact that it's better we wouldn't have gone to war, because, if we went to war, we're going to make a mess of it.

And I don't think that's a good legacy for the United States. I think how we conducted the war after we arrived is as important as the reasons why we went in.

The Bush administration lied to the American public and Congress to start a war of choice, which is another way to say an unnecessary war, and thus inherently, deeply immoral. The Bush administration also instituted a torture regime, one of the most disgraceful, shameful actions of the U.S. in living memory. And members of the Bush administration largely got away with it, which is rather discouraging. Likewise, the Bush administration was quite authoritarian, and U.S. conservatives and Republicans have moved even further in that direction since.

I did find at least one hopeful point, though. The Pew Research Center has a superb piece, "A Look Back at How Fear and False Beliefs Bolstered U.S. Public Support for War in Iraq," which chronicles the shifts in public opinion over the years and also recaps the political history of the Iraq War pretty well. (It even links a piece by The Washington Post's Glenn Kessler, whose fact-checking can be hit or miss, but wrote a pretty good piece about the claim that the Bush administration lied to start the war, all spurred by former Bush press secretary Ari Fleischer claiming that it was a lie to say the Bush team lied.) In the Pew article, the most interesting parts might be these charts:

The Bush team has mostly escaped consequences, certainly legally and professionally, but public opinion definitely turned against the Iraq War and that perspective has persisted. It's telling that, from at least 2015 onward, Donald Trump has lied to conservative and Republican voters, falsely claiming he had always opposed the Iraq War. He was and is pandering, of course, but it's interesting that, even when speaking to the demographic groups most likely to still support the Iraq War, he's thought pretending to oppose the war would play better.

I won't link all of my previous Iraq posts, but besides "The Dogs of War" from 2013, these are probably the most significant:

"Iraq and Vietnam: Selling the Stab-in-the-Back Myth" (8/30/07). (Note that Blogger has oddly resized some images from old posts, but trying to fix them can create other problems.)

If Shakespeare is your thing, you might appreciate "The Knaves of the Bush Administration (3/20/07).

"Day of Shame" (2/5/08) is about Colin Powell's 2003 presentation to the United Nations about Iraq's supposed weapons of mass destruction, a collection of falsehoods that was pivotal in selling the war.

I wrote several pieces on the "surge" of American troops in Iraq. "The Surge Is Still Not Working" (3/1/08) summarizes and links some of the others.

"John '100 Years' McCain" (4/9/08) took an in-depth look at remarks then-presidential-candidate John McCain made. His defenders complained he was taken out of context, but a fair assessment with much more context did not make him look much better.

"Giddy Minds and Foreign Quarrels" (11/11/09) was one of the key pieces in a set of interrelated posts for Armistice Day in 2009, and the one most focused on the Iraq War.

"The Graveyard of Democracy" (11/11/21) was mainly about the Afghanistan War, but there's considerable overlap with the Iraq War, of course. The post cites Brown University's "Costs of War" project, which estimates the costs of all U.S. post-9/11 war spending at $8 trillion, which includes future obligations in veterans' care and financial debt for roughly 30 years.

May we remember history accurately, discuss decisions honestly and avoid all unnecessary wars in the future.

9/11/12

Kurt Eichenwald has a piece in The New York Times titled "The Deafness Before the Storm" that adds details to what's known about 9/11:

On Aug. 6, 2001, President George W. Bush received a classified review of the threats posed by Osama bin Laden and his terrorist network, Al Qaeda. That morning’s “presidential daily brief” — the top-secret document prepared by America’s intelligence agencies — featured the now-infamous heading: “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.” A few weeks later, on 9/11, Al Qaeda accomplished that goal.

On April 10, 2004, the Bush White House declassified that daily brief — and only that daily brief — in response to pressure from the 9/11 Commission, which was investigating the events leading to the attack. Administration officials dismissed the document’s significance, saying that, despite the jaw-dropping headline, it was only an assessment of Al Qaeda’s history, not a warning of the impending attack. While some critics considered that claim absurd, a close reading of the brief showed that the argument had some validity.

That is, unless it was read in conjunction with the daily briefs preceding Aug. 6, the ones the Bush administration would not release. While those documents are still not public, I have read excerpts from many of them, along with other recently declassified records, and come to an inescapable conclusion: the administration’s reaction to what Mr. Bush was told in the weeks before that infamous briefing reflected significantly more negligence than has been disclosed. In other words, the Aug. 6 document, for all of the controversy it provoked, is not nearly as shocking as the briefs that came before it.

The direct warnings to Mr. Bush about the possibility of a Qaeda attack began in the spring of 2001. By May 1, the Central Intelligence Agency told the White House of a report that “a group presently in the United States” was planning a terrorist operation. Weeks later, on June 22, the daily brief reported that Qaeda strikes could be “imminent,” although intelligence suggested the time frame was flexible.

Head over to read the rest. You'll be absolutely shocked to discover that the neocons were complete idiots, even beyond their saber-rattling about Iraq and Saddam Hussein.

Many Americans were stunned by 9/11. While some were bent on vengeance, many showed a generous outlook – at least toward their fellow Americans, as well as government officials. Few people, if any, wanted a witch hunt. (Surely the Bush administration did all it could!)

I suspect, knowing right-wingers, that had Al Gore been president, there would have been far less forgiveness, and they would have been calling for his head. Of course, it's quite possible a Gore administration would have prevented 9/11 in the first place, given the much stronger focus the Clinton/Gore White House gave Al Qaeda. But it's impossible to know for sure.

Regardless, the Bush administration showed deadly incompetence in allowing 9/11 to occur, and its subsequent exploitation of 9/11 to wage an unnecessary war remains one of the most shameful episodes in our nation's history. It's also shameful that Bush officials have faced so few repercussions for it (in part because some many members of the press were culpable in selling the war, too).

I definitely don't begrudge anyone who still remembers 9/11 with grief, especially anyone who lost someone. The days after, and the first anniversary, were days of reflection for many people, and certainly were for me. But for the past few years, I've found it's been the exploitation that stands out – the still largely-unaddressed and certainly unpunished exploitation (the latter being less important than the former). Unfortunately, for America as a whole, that seems to be 9/11's enduring legacy. "Never Forget" only extends so far.

In related news, Human Rights Watch has a new report out, Delivered Into Enemy Hands, that "meticulously documents a George W. Bush–era CIA program of torture, including waterboarding, in careful collaboration with former Libyan strongman Muammar Qaddafi."

Meanwhile, The New York Times reports:

Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. announced Thursday that no one would be prosecuted for the deaths of a prisoner in Afghanistan in 2002 and another in Iraq in 2003, eliminating the last possibility that any criminal charges will be brought as a result of the brutal interrogations carried out by the C.I.A.

Mr. Holder had already ruled out any charges related to the use of waterboarding and other methods that most human rights experts consider to be torture. His announcement closes a contentious three-year investigation by the Justice Department and brings to an end years of dispute over whether line intelligence or military personnel or their superiors would be held accountable for the abuse of prisoners in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

The closing of the two cases means that the Obama administration’s limited effort to scrutinize the counterterrorism programs carried out under President George W. Bush has come to an end.

This comes via Scott Horton, who has more, as do emptywheel and Brad DeLong.

Sorry, this post has been awfully bleak; it's just that I don't think anything dismays me more as an American than the Bush-era torture program. The subsequent decisions not to prosecute, or even really to investigate, are hardly surprising at this point, but remain discouraging. But contrary to my pessimism about "Never Forget" above, DeLong passes on a sage comment from a reader:

I would urge people to think of accountability as a generational project – this is how it has worked out in Chile, Argentina, South Africa... the thing that can be done now is create opportunities for more participants to tell their stories, put on record what was done and who did it and how, so that the record gets fuller rather than thinner over time.

Amen. Well said. Many people (including me) have mentioned South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission as a possible model for dealing with America's torture programs. But since the government won't do it, it's up to the citizenry. Where the Justice Department was gutless and corrupt, the ACLU, Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International and other organizations and individuals can document, serve as witnesses, and remember.

The Truth on "The Surge"

Within the past 12 months, Charlie Gibson, Katie Couric and Tom Brokaw (among others) have badgered leading Democrats to proclaim "the Surge" a success. In each case that I've seen, the Democrat (Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, Joe Biden, John Edwards) has given a serious and accurate response, to which the reporters have been dismissive, pushing on with their same insistence – 'Say it! The Surge has worked! Hallelujah!' There's some good reporting on Iraq in the newspapers, particularly from McClatchy, but the reporting on television is often frustratingly misleading. As we've often discussed, any drop in violence is most welcome, but the supposed purpose of "the surge" was to buy time for a political reconciliation that hasn't occurred yet, and may be very far off. The drop in violence has multiple causes, including the escalation of American troops, but there are other extremely significant factors it would be dishonest (and folly) to ignore. That said, while things may no longer be horrifically dreadful, they're still quite dreadful. There are still 4-5 million displaced Iraqis, a staggering number especially give the population size, and basic services such as water and electricity are still below pre-war levels for many Iraqis. There is some sincere disagreement on whether withdrawal is the best move, and at what pace - although given the feelings of the Iraqi people and the position of the Maliki government, currently all American troops would be out by 2011 (we'll see how that plays out). Regardless, there's much less room for wild disagreement when it comes to (ahem) serious discussion of the realities of Iraq – realities which are complex, thorny and dire. The occupation cheerleaders rarely mention those realities, preferring to present an extremely narrow, misleading, sometimes Pollyanna view. Some go further, and add the vile McCarthyist rhetoric employed by Republican Senator Lindsey Graham at the Republican National Convention, where he all but denounced Barack Obama and other Democrats as traitors. Some of this is an extremely repulsive breed of politics, some of it's myopic zealotry, some of it's a fervent desire for vindication - but it's all dangerous.

Some of the press might also seek this justification, however unconsciously, given that so many pushed a "pro-Bush, pro-war narrative" and so many still feel they did a good job in the run-up to the war. A large number of prominent reporters (especially on television) never seem to consider for even a moment that a key goal of "the surge" was to influence American politics, a critique confirmed by Bob Woodward's latest book (the basic game was long ago figured out by liberal bloggers, Tom Tomorrow and The Daily Show). But then, this is a group who all but ignored the story about an illegal, domestic propaganda campaign by the Pentagon they abetted, rather than admit that they were, yet again, credulous dupes.

There are a number of excellent media outlets and bloggers for Iraq news and analysis, and we have several fairly extensive pieces among the BH and VS posts on Iraq. Meanwhile, Dan Froomkin's 9/9/08 column, "Inside Bush's Surge," spurred by excerpts from Woodward's book, provides a good overview of the complex realities of "the surge." For instance:

In a sidebar, Woodward criticizes the conventional wisdom that the surge worked. "[T]he full story was more complicated. At least three other factors were as important as, or even more important than, the surge. These factors either have not been reported publicly or have received less attention than the influx of troops.

"Beginning in the late spring of 2007, the U.S. military and intelligence agencies launched a series of top-secret operations that enabled them to locate, target and kill key individuals in groups such as al-Qaeda in Iraq, the Sunni insurgency and renegade Shia militias, or so-called special groups. The operations incorporated some of the most highly classified techniques and information in the U.S. government. . . .

"A second important factor in the lessening of violence was the so-called Anbar Awakening, in which tens of thousands of Sunnis turned against al-Qaeda in Iraq and signed up with U.S. forces."

(Woodward neglects to mention the $25 million a month that the U.S. government is paying those Sunni gunmen for their services.)

"A third significant break came Aug. 29, when militant Shia cleric Moqtada al-Sadr ordered his powerful Mahdi Army to suspend operations, including attacks against U.S. troops," Woodward writes.

And there are some other factors Woodward leaves out. Consider, for instance, the possibility that years of ethnic cleansing have left a formerly integrated country fragmented into internally peaceful but heavily armed pieces. And there is growing evidence that all sides are now just patiently waiting until we leave to start fighting again -- this time with plenty of American money and weapons on every side.

Froomkin's intro spells things out very well (emphasis added):

It's not exactly news that President Bush dismisses the advice of his military commanders when it doesn't suit him -- and did so, most notably, when he ordered a surge in troops to Iraq early last year over the intense objections of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and his top commanders in the region.

Bob Woodward's new book calls renewed attention to Bush's problematic decision-making style, but leaves unanswered some key questions. Among them: Were Bush's motivations in pushing through the surge noble or self-serving? And was he, ultimately, right or wrong to do so?

A lot rests on the answer to those questions -- maybe even the November election. And although Woodward doesn't appear to be quite ready to weigh in, he does provide some hints. He accuses Bush of deception and disengagement. He airs top military leaders' well-founded concerns that the surge would do enormous damage to the long-term fighting ability of the armed forces. And he argues that the surge is far from the sole reason for the reduction in violence in Iraq.

He also raises the distinct possibility that domestic political factors were a big factor: He quotes Bush telling soon-to-be-ousted Central Command commander Gen. John P. Abizaid at a National Security Council session in December that the surge would "also help here at home, since for many the measure of success is reduction in violence."

But you could also reasonably read Woodward's book as primarily a complaint that it took Bush so long to act, rather than that he did the wrong thing. Woodward is much more critical of the process than of the decision.

Indeed, conventional wisdom in Washington has coalesced around the notion that surge -- a plan Woodward describes as being masterminded by retired Army Gen. Jack Keane, using his back-channel relationship with Bush and Vice President Cheney -- has been a success.

But the evidence actually suggests that its most dazzling success has been the effect here at home -- precisely the one Bush had in mind.

The surge, among other quite possibly more significant factors, has dramatically reduced violence in Iraq, leading the American public to turn its attention elsewhere, and leaving the issue of withdrawal for the next president to worry about.

But has it led to the sort of Iraqi political reconciliation Bush promised would come as a result? Hardly.

Has it overstrained the army to the breaking point? The stress fractures we see so far, including the incredible burdens on the troops and their families, have yet to fully express themselves.

Has it led to a faster pullout than would have otherwise been possible? Certainly not. Given the political tenor of the country shortly before Bush announced an escalation, a lot of our troops could well have been withdrawn by now had things gone otherwise. Instead, as Bush made clear this morning, there will be more troops in Iraq when he leaves office than there were in January 2007.

Meanwhile, the BBC interviews General Petraeus, who is still offering variations on his "fragile but reversible" assessment. The web summary is titled "No victory in Iraq, says Petraeus":

The outgoing commander of US troops in Iraq, Gen David Petraeus, has said that he will never declare victory there.

In a BBC interview, Gen Petraeus said that recent security gains were "not irreversible" and that the US still faced a "long struggle".

When asked if US troops could withdraw from Iraqi cities by the middle of next year, he said that would be "doable"...

Gen Petraeus took up his role in Iraq in February 2007, as President Bush announced his "surge" plan.

He has overseen its implementation, including the deployment of nearly 30,000 additional troops to trouble spots in Iraq.

In an interview with the BBC's Newsnight programme, Gen Petraeus said that when he took charge in Iraq "the violence was horrific and the fabric of society was being torn apart".

Leaving his post, he said there were "many storm clouds on the horizon which could develop into real problems".

Overall he summed up the situation as "still hard but hopeful", saying that progress in Iraq was "a bit more durable" but that the situation there remained fragile.

He said he did not know that he would ever use the word "victory": "This is not the sort of struggle where you take a hill, plant the flag and go home to a victory parade... it's not war with a simple slogan."

He said al-Qaeda's efforts to portray its jihad in Iraq as going well were "disingenuous". It was, in fact "going poorly", he said.

Of his strategy of establishing joint security stations in key locations, Gen Petraeus said that "you can't secure the people if you don't live with them".

He said it was now fair to say that the Iraqis were standing up as US forces stood down. The confidence and capability of Iraqi forces had increased substantially, he said.

In a post titled " We’ll always do just well enough in Iraq to never leave," John Amato remarks, "Long struggle, not irreversible, still hard, many clouds on the horizon… These aren’t words of praise about Iraq being uttered by the General. Once again we hear the "fragile" word. Is that what success is, fragile?"

I guess Petraeus just doesn't know what military genius and Iraq expert Jonah Goldberg does, since Goldberg crowed that "America is very close to flat out winning in Iraq," thanks almost entirely to the Republicans, of course. (Goldberg's latest bullshit is ably challenged by Warren Street and Blue Girl).

On the one hand, we have deluded and/or dissembling hacks like Joe Lieberman, who's shamelessly trying to have the Senate proclaim "the surge" a success. On the other, if one but reads a decent newspaper - or good roundups by bloggers such as Cernig – one can get a sense of what "fragile" really means. I'm anxious about the presidential debates and more potentially misleading Iraq questions, because the stakes are just too high for that. To date, far too many leading television journalists have pushed the hack view, and have shown but a "fragile" respect for the truth.

(Cross-posted at The Blue Herald)

"In Their World, Iraq is Okay."

Seymour Hersh's latest New Yorker piece "Preparing the Battlefield," about the Bush administration's "secret moves against Iran," has justifiably gotten a fair amount of attention. Read the article if you haven't. Meanwhile, here's some of Hersh on CNN, on NPR's Fresh Air and Democracy Now! Meanwhile, via Dan Froomkin, there's this gem caught by ThinkProgress (they have the video, too) from Hersh's conversation with Andrea Mitchell, after she asked Hersh about the possibility of the U.S. attacking (or supporting an attack on) Iran:

Hersh: "Oh, you know, how the hell do I know? . . . What I can tell you is we're loaded for bear. And we've been looking at it for three years... If Israel goes -- I'll tell you what Cheney says privately. . . . What he says privately is, 'We can't let Israel go because, first of all, they don't have the firepower, we do. We have much more firepower. And secondly, if they go, we'll be blamed anyway.'"

Froomkin cited others' opinions on the likelihood of an attack on Iran in his online discussion yesterday, as well as in his column today. I'll also pass on thoughts by Jill, Steve Audio and DDay.

While we definitely shouldn't stop scrutinizing the Bush administration on Iran (not to mention Iran itself), Iraq also bears watching. Not only do the administration's views on Iraq shape their attitudes toward Iran, their policy and rhetoric on Iraq is closely tied in as well. One section of Hersh's interview with Terry Gross on Fresh Air really leapt out at me. You can find it about 35 minutes in. Here's my transcription (with some verbal stutters omitted):

Terry Gross: I can't help but wonder, if Cheney or whoever else is considering a military strike against Iran, what they make of how things have turned out in Iraq, because some of the justifications and some of the tactics we've used so far in Iran seem to parallel Iraq, and I can't think of a lot of people who are happy with the outcome so far in Iraq. Plus, we've spent so much money, and have deployed so much of our military resources, including lots of the National Guard in Iraq, could we even afford to tie up more in Iran? But anyways, I can't help but wonder how Iraq is influencing people like Vice President Cheney now?

Seymour Hersh: You just have to listen to what they say. Because what they say is fascinating. We're actually winning. We're turning the corner. And we got rid of Saddam Hussein, and by any chance, that's a plus. Just listen to what they say. Because in their world, Iraq is okay. They've done something useful. And it's gonna be great. We're turning the corner, we're gonna solve the problems. The surge, quote unquote, worked. Never mind that the country is completely destroyed physically, and that ethnic cleansing… If you just read and listen to what they say, it's upbeat. So they don't see this mess they've created as a mess.

So the argument that why would they expand the war, we're not doing so well, into yet another country, they're not sure we're not doing so well.

Hersh goes on to mention one of the key elements of his article, how Cheney and others in the Bush administration kept Admiral Fallon in the dark about covert operations in the Middle East, despite that Fallon was slotted to oversee military operations there. There's also the recurring theme of Cheney micromanaging, and thinking he's a military genius. Oh, and a Democratic Congress giving Bush pretty much everything he wants.

Currently, the Bush administration and its allies – including Tony Blankley, David Brooks and Joe Lieberman are trying to sell the dangerous horseshit that Iraq is doing well and Bush's ongoing adventure was and is all worth it. We’ve already seen key members of the press eager to run with this, even though it's a shameless falsehood. As we’ve gone over many times, any decrease in violence, however momentary, is of course welcome, but the Iraq-is-getting-better crowd never discuss the 4-5 million displaced Iraqis, and rarely mention that the stated purpose of the "surge" was to buy time for political reconciliation that just hasn't come, and is by no means imminent. Bush's embassy staff in Iraq are claiming big progress, but those claims are highly suspect at best, and directly contradicted by the more independent Government Accountability Office.

For a more accurate picture of Iraq, one could check out a recent Tom Dispatch piece, "The Good News in Iraq (Don't Count on It)" or Juan Cole's "The Real State of Iraq" (this latter piece previously linked by QuestionGirl, and a more detailed examination of themes explored in our March piece, "The Surge is Still Not Working"). Then there's the McClatchy page for Iraq news, as well as our humble efforts in the BH and VS Iraq categories. Needless to say, Iraq is not okay. Nor are any Bush officials or their pundit supporters to be trusted for a moment and taken at face value when they claim otherwise. To sell a new war, they need to convince people that their previous, ongoing one is a success, the truth be damned. As for the press, besides wanted a new headline besides "Iraq is still in horrible straits," some of them probably want validation for being so disastrously wrong before. (Certainly unrepentant hawks such as Michael O'Hanlon fall in that camp.)

One of many freedoms in America has been the First Amendment, which includes freedom of speech and freedom of the press. There's a responsibility that comes with that freedom, especially when coupled with power. Thomas Jefferson once said that "If I had to choose between government without newspapers, and newspapers without government, I wouldn't hesitate to choose the latter." As a whole, it's hard to argue that the press justify Jefferson's faith. But while David Broder, Richard Cohen and Charlie Gibson, among many others, fail miserably in that respect, there are other journalists, including Helen Thomas, Dana Priest, Lara Logan, Daniel Schorr and Seymour Hersh (among others) who exemplify how it should be done. As DDay put it in the post linked above:

…It's clear to me, as we approach July 4th, that there's no better patriot in this country than Seymour Hersh, taking on the job of 236 Democrats in the House and 50 in the Senate, trying to hold off this insanity for a few more months before transitioning into a new Adminstration which will hopefully recognize the broad consensus for negotiation and diplomacy with the Islamic Republic as opposed to the folly of war.

Indeed. Happy Independence Day, especially to the true patriots.

(Cross-posted at The Blue Herald)

McCain: 'Victory' in Iraq by 2013!

Buck previously covered McCain's comments about achieving "victory" in Iraq by 2013. If you missed it, here's the video:



Here's the key text:

By January 2013, America has welcomed home most of the servicemen and women who have sacrificed terribly so that America might be secure in her freedom. The Iraq War has been won. Iraq is a functioning democracy, although still suffering from the lingering effects of decades of tyranny and centuries of sectarian tension. Violence still occurs, but it is spasmodic and much reduced. Civil war has been prevented; militias disbanded; the Iraqi Security Force is professional and competent; al Qaeda in Iraq has been defeated; and the Government of Iraq is capable of imposing its authority in every province of Iraq and defending the integrity of its borders. The United States maintains a military presence there, but a much smaller one, and it does not play a direct combat role.

I was curious as to how McCain and his campaign came up with "2013." Did it sound long enough to be realistic regarding Iraq, but short enough to be politically palatable to the American public? It sure sound better than 100 years! As I commented in Buck's post, it also means McCain is saying that he'll give you "victory" in Iraq — if you elect him not once, but twice.

That specific point can be argued somewhat, since McCain mentions January 2013, the end of his hypothetical first term, but that would of course be after the November 2012 election. And the "2013" reference was not some throwaway. You can read and watch McCain's full speech at his site here, or watch a series of YouTube videos starting with this one. But also check out this press release based on that speech and hawking "2013" throughout. The same page also plays this McCain ad:



All shall be well, or at least better, under McCain by 2013 — Bush's third term.

I find McCain's claims of "clarity" pretty funny, since his hallmark has been a lack of clarity and soundness on virtually every issue, and certainly on Iraq. Give him some points for articulating a vision, I guess, although I found his strategies for achieving these results poor, vague or non-existent. To me, this sounded more like a bedtime story. Among the many glaring questions that come to mind is, how the hell is McCain going to pay for our occupation in Iraq when his vision of "victory" is nowhere in sight and given the current cost of 2-3 billion per week?!?

I already covered McCain's vague and unrealistic stances on Iraq at length in John "100 Years" McCain, including all the ballyhoo about that particular statement. His latest speech is basically just more of the same, and the "100 Years" post essentially rebuts him on every claim he's making now. The BH and VS categories on Iraq have some other pretty relevant stuff debunking much of the Bush-McCain rhetoric on Iraq. But the key factors to remember regarding McCain are these:

He does not have a exit strategy on Iraq.

He does not even want an exit strategy on Iraq.

Not only is it highly unlikely that his policies, costly in terms of lives and treasure, will achieve his 2013 goals, it's quite likely they'll make them worse.

That's not to mention that:

A new poll by ICR found 68% of Americans want Congress to use the power of the purse to bring all troops home from Iraq within the next six months. This is up from 54% last September.

And the public is right. Bush, McCain and the neocons have had over five years now on Iraq. They've gotten to call the shots almost entirely as they've wanted to the entire time, and by any standard, and in so many, painful ways, they've been a failure. Many people have died and suffered as a result. America, Iraq and the world can't afford five more years of cowboy diplomacy abroad, Republican mismanagement at home, and bedtime stories from the bullies in the bully pulpit.

(Cross-posted at The Blue Herald)

More on “100 Years”

To update my recent (ridiculously long) post on John McCain, the pieces on “100 years” just keep coming — or I keep finding them. In this round, here’s Dave Tiffany (the NH questioner), Hendrik Hertzberg, Josh Marshall, DDay #1, DDay #2, Somerby #1, Somerby #2, and Somerby #3 on “100 years.” Feel free to pass on any other key posts I’ve missed.

I would hope at this point my take is fairly clear, and apologies for going self-referential here. On the style front, I won’t claim rhetorical purity in my previous post; I don’t have a problem with tweaking McCain or others where I think they’ve been disingenuous, but readers may disagree with my assessments on that score, and the real point is to critique McCain and the rest on substance, which I hope I’ve achieved. Ultimately, how important is it if McCain’s sincere or not if he’s also wrong? I think I’ve provided a pretty complete picture of John McCain’s rhetoric on Iraq, his grasp (or lack thereof) of the situation there, and his policies.

In this latest round, Somerby makes a number of good points. As he writes in reaction to his e-mail, “We were mainly struck by the number of progressives who think we can beat McCain this year only by making inaccurate statements.” He points to this (very good) Frank Rich op-ed on this whole mess as a model of how to proceed.

I do think there’s some serious cross-talking going on here. While McCain’s been taken out of context by Democrats, and it’s inaccurate to say he actually proposed “100 years of war” or “endless war,” it is accurate to say that under McCain there will be no end to the war, at least no time soon, and he has no exit strategy. There’s a distinction between those two positions, but they really aren’t miles apart, certainly not in terms of their practical consequences. McCain isn’t a comic book super-villain, gleefully surveying the battlefield and salivating over the prospect of death and destruction. He’s a mistaken man (I’d add obstinate and occasionally immature) whose policies would likely continue the current rate of death and destruction. McCain’s Iraq policy is virtually identical to Bush’s — it’s stay the course, an “open-ended commitment.” Frank Rich makes a similar point when he writes:

The sum total of [McCain’s] public record suggests that he could well prolong the war for another century — not because he’s the crazed militarist portrayed by Democrats, but through sheer inertia, bad judgment and blundering.

Whatever McCain’s process for arriving at his positions, whether from sincerity, calculation, insight, obtuseness, stubbornness or a sense of duty, however base or noble his intentions, he remains wrong. I’m starting to think of McCain and his “100 years” comments in terms of 3 Ds: His remarks were a Dodge, his portrayals of Iraq are Delusional, and his policies (continuing Bush’s) would be just as Disastrous. But the last two are much more important.

John McCain talks about the costs of staying in Iraq, and being honest about those costs with the American people. All right. If McCain were elected president, perhaps Congress would develop a spine and cut off funding, or McCain would actually withdraw troops due to some miraculous change in Iraq or a change of his mind. But currently, staying in Iraq costs us roughly 12 billion per month. Four more years would amount to roughly 576 billion, on top of the tab Bush will leave when he finally departs office (after running out the clock on the hellish situation he’s created). At the current rate, several thousand more American troops would die in those four years, and tens or hundreds of thousands of Iraqis. I suspect the total American cost could be greater still, in terms of our economy, the strain on our military, veteran care, and international trade and prestige (not to mention greater enmity in the Middle East). Are all those costs that we’re willing to pay? And is McCain honestly discussing them? He claims the national security cost of us leaving Iraq is far greater, but I hope I’ve refuted that pretty thoroughly. I also have a new post on the Petraeus-Crocker testimony that tackles similar issues.

Somerby’s admonitions about accuracy are well-taken, as well as his political advice in the first piece linked above:

When you misstate about McCain, the mainstream press will fact-check you. You run the risk of making him into a martyr, as happened with Bush in 2004.

Yup. So why not critique McCain instead on his genuinely horrible policies? Let me return to Rich, who ends his piece by writing:

“We’re succeeding,” Mr. McCain said after his last trip to Iraq. “I don’t care what anybody says.” Again, it’s the last sentence that’s accurate. When General Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker testify before Congress again this week — against the backdrop of a million-Iraqi, anti-American protest called by Mr. Sadr — Mr. McCain will ram home all this “success” no matter the facts.

The difference between the Democrats and Mr. McCain going forward is clear enough: They want to find a way out of the morass, however provisional and imperfect, and he equates staying the disastrous course with patriotism. Mr. McCain’s doomed promise of military “victory” in Iraq is akin to Wile E. Coyote’s perpetual pursuit of the Road Runner, with much higher carnage. This isn’t patriotism. As the old saying goes, doing the same thing over and over again and hoping you’ll get a different result is the definition of insanity.

The Democrats should also stop repeating their 100-years-war calumny against Mr. McCain. There’s too much at stake for America for them to add their own petty distortions to an epic tragedy that only a long-overdue national reckoning with hard truths can bring to an end.

Prettier and pithier than I. I’m happy to move beyond the “100 years” remarks, as I tried to do in my earlier post, since John McCain’s been misquoted. But he’s also dangerously wrong. That’s the point that needs to be hammered home relentlessly. Let’s get to it, and work to make the media tell the full, accurate story of McCain’s horrible policies, on Iraq and virtually every other issue.

(Cross-posted at The Blue Herald)