{"id":454,"date":"2006-06-24T13:50:00","date_gmt":"2006-06-24T13:50:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/2006\/06\/24\/454\/"},"modified":"2015-11-24T20:28:18","modified_gmt":"2015-11-25T01:28:18","slug":"454","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/?p=454","title":{"rendered":"The Trial Of Dick Cheney"},"content":{"rendered":"

The other night I watched that show on PBS about Dick Cheney and how he jockeyed the American response to 9-11, thru Afghanistan and into Iraq (i.e., The Dark Side<\/a>). The show was extremely powerful and compelling. The people doing the talking were the people who were there at the CIA and State Department. Bottom line: had we stayed out of Iraq and continued going after al Qaeda following our initial successes in Afghanistan, Saddam Hussein might still be in power in Iraq right now, but he’d probably be no closer to having the bomb. His nuclear program was in shambles after the 1992 Iraqi War and never got going again due to the UN economic sanctions (despite their being criticized for their ineffectiveness). On the other side of the coin, al Qaeda would arguably have been mostly deflated by this time. We would have impressed any and all would-be terrorists of the future that messing with the big Eagle is a fatal enterprise. <\/p>\n

But instead, thanks to Mr. Cheney, we are bogged down in a civil war in Iraq; Iran is hell-bent on getting the bomb because of all those American flags on its border (and unlike Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, Iran has the economy and infrastructure to support a nuclear program); and al Qaeda and its figurehead (Osama Bin Laden) are injured but still very much alive and intent on further mayhem. But to be fair: yes, Saddam Hussein is finally facing justice; and we did get a Bin Laden wanna-be (al Zarqari) recently, a guy who was making big trouble for the moderate government in Jordan (in addition to all the harm he was doing in Iraq). Nevertheless, there’s a compelling argument that America would be safer right now had Mr. Bush listened to the CIA and not to Cheney and his friends. <\/p>\n

What if that’s the way the historical picture really develops? What if, in 20 years or so, historians look back on the 2001-2006 period and conclude, based on the way that things turn out, that the Bush Administration made a bad choice in focusing its anti-terrorism energy on Iraq after stomping (but not completely eradicating) the Taliban in Afghanistan? How do we judge Mr. Cheney? Was there an argument for his view that Iraq was the biggest long-term threat to the west in the post-911 world? Or was he on a power trip that distorted his mind? Was it reasonable to believe that Saddam Hussein still had the bomb within his reach, and would have given it to al Qaeda or whomever had succeeded them as the number 1 snake-in-the-grass? Or did Chaney figure that George W Bush, on top of being a rube, had an exploitable psychological vulnerability about Iraq given that his father didn’t finish the job in 1992? Was Cheney’s mind ultimately creating its own rationalizations to allow him to become (de facto) the most powerful man in the USA, arguably the world? <\/p>\n

Frontline did point out that Cheney had reason to be suspicious of the CIA’s doubts about Saddam Hussein’s nuclear capacity and its connections to al Qaeda. In 1992, the CIA failed to identify a fairly significant Iraqi nuclear development facility, and thus our forces ironically left it alone during Desert Storm. So, when the CIA again claimed not to see anything indicating that a Saddam bomb was imminent, Cheney was perhaps entitled to his reservations. (And I suppose that he never trusted the UN weapons inspectors, even after they finally took a closer look in 2003; I can’t imagine Dick Cheney ever having a nice thing to say about Hans Blix.) The Clinton Administration pretty clearly did become too easy about Iraq by 1998 or so. So yea, perhaps in his heart of hearts, Cheney did believe he was like Churchill in 1939, swimming valiantly against the tide of pacifist denial, with the fate of civilization dependent upon on his contrarian nature. <\/p>\n

But back to that “fate of civilization” thing. Yes, Churchill used it to good advantage against Hitler and against the Neville Chamberland crowd, i.e. those Englishmen who wishfully thought that the Nazis could be accommodated. Churchill was certainly vindicated by placing the fate of the world on his shoulders. But still, you have to be careful; that can do funny things to your mind, especially if you are in the position to do something about it. Recall that Churchill, unlike Cheney, was not in a politically advantageous position in 1939. It would be another year or so until Hitler had clearly proved himself unstoppable (invading Poland and then France and Russia), and Churchill’s eventual ascent was clearly a public affirmation of his hawkish stance. <\/p>\n

Cheney’s suspicions about Iraq were not put to public referendum and were not affirmed by definitive events (although Condi did have a good point about the undesirability of finding about Iraq’s capacity through a mushroom cloud). And Cheney’s words weren’t all that different in nature from the self-sustaining rationales that Lyndon Johnson built up around the Vietnam situation, the anti-Communist rationales that cost the lives of hundreds of thousands of young Americans to almost no advantage in the late 60s and early 70s. In the passions of 9-11, our nation totally forgot that lesson.<\/p>\n

So, how do we stop reasonable doubt on the part of our leaders from becoming a self-defining, power-grabbing monomania? I hope that those historians of the year 2026 have a good answer to that.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The other night I watched that show on PBS about Dick Cheney and how he jockeyed the American response to 9-11, thru Afghanistan and into Iraq (i.e., The Dark Side). The show was extremely powerful and compelling. The people doing the talking were the people who were there at the CIA and State Department. Bottom […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[24,7],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/454"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=454"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/454\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5778,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/454\/revisions\/5778"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=454"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=454"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=454"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}