Cheney's Jihad

I never trusted Cheney when he was in office because he had his and Bush's agenda. It didn't matter what was good for the American people they flew the American Flag, but really it was the Texas Flag that they really flew. Oil and revenge is what drove us to the state of despair and it will take years for America to hold its head high amidst all of the other flags of the world.

* Iraq never represented a threat to the United States. Never. We allowed ourselves to get sucked in there, and we have spent an enormous amount of blood and money trying to figure a way out. And we're really no closer, in spite of Obama's promises.
* We invaded Iraq twice without following the Constitutional provision that only Congress can declare war. This continues both parties' complete disavowal of what strikes my eyes as a clear Constitutional requirement, so it can hardly be surprising that our government continues to pursue a foreign policy that ensures blowback at every turn.
* Everyone who hates Bush for the Iraq War seemingly has no problem with Obama's foot-dragging in Iraq and escalation in Afghanistan, which makes as little sense (arguably, even less) and will cost us dearly in the end, should "the end" ever actually come. But hey, it's a Democrat's war, so that's OK.

It's out of fashion to describe a person disabled and disabling by imaginary fears as an old woman.This is a pity, because it seems to describe Dick Cheney as vice-president pretty well. 9/11 followed by eight years an earlier attack by the same people -- al-Qaeda -- on the World Trade Center, and so from the start presented the idea that al-Qaeda couldn't very easily mount such operations over a weekend; or a month; or a year. But that fiction's always been the Cheney thesis -- obviously a poor thesis by about 2004, but one continuing to be presented to the American people by senior administration figures with a similarly hysterical and ill-based view of the nature of the threat on which we've now spent 5000 American lives, some hundrds of thousands of Iraqi ones, and close to a trillion dollars.

All this while debauching the US economy by spending Chinese money on war while cutting taxes to the American rich.

Although it's little noticed, Cheney as vice-president followed a path first laid out by Louis Freeh, the failed FBI Director of the Nineties who hobbled American counterterrorism by sending his specialist FBI agents off to Africa and Arabia in crews of 150 to 400 -- thus disabling them from looking for terrorist threats back home.

In the afterlight of history, Cheney's main service to the United States could prove giving us our first broad understanding of how ill-equipped for the modern world the US is in terms of its highly expensive military and intelligence services.

Inept political leadership sapped the strength of both. A political appointee scorned and bypassed the senior US Army general who gave what now evidently was an accurate estimate of the size of the forces needed to invade and hold Iraq, and separately, ordered the military force in Afghanistan be weakened greatly to mount the unneeded Iraq invasion.

It is a matter of regret that there were no high-level resignations from the uniformed military in public protest of those obviously foolish political decisions. America's finest senior officers either fell into line with the political dreams, or else silently hung in there for their pensions. Neither of these courses seems to have served the republic well.

The military and the intelligence agencies have both failed the core aims announced in 2001 for the war, or crusade, on terror. al-Qaeda has grown in strength and geographic spread; Osama bin Laden has not been brought to justice, the Taliban,, our egenrals now say, are riding a wave of success. This despite the staggering concentration of blood, brain and money on affairs in Iraq and Afghanistan -- as though those are the only or the main sources of potential hazard to the United States.

The pioneering Freeh years made clear that such deficiencies are virtually mandated by Cheney-style over-concentration on a overtightly limited targets. The FBI investment in sending those agents to foreign nations resulted in no single capture of any terrorist there, and also -- much overlooked -- left the antiterrorist FBI agents in domestic postings incapable of responding effectively to tips from concerned citizens about why 19 Moslem men were training within the United States to fly large airliners -- not to land them, not to take off.

Cheney might take some conmfort fronm the fact that so far, the US has not been forced to face highly-armed foreign terrorists in the streets of Cleveland -- a chimera much used in the early post-9/11. The terrorists themselves seem to have had no interest in fighting there at all. This was just one of the shameless tweakings of citizen fears that emitted from Washington in 2001-2. Perhaps it's the best match for the claim that al-Qaeda was working on developing atomic weapons, because of the discovery of three or four pages about how such devices work -- taken from some blasted high-school textbook. Those who found and examined these documents must have known they offered no path to atomic power. No nmatter: scaring the American people was a prime Bush-Cheney target, and the documents were released all the same.

Wait a minute, isn't questioning the president's decisions treason? Seems to me it used to be, as recently as this time last year ...

If torture doesn't work, that's the end of the argument.

But what if it does? Even if it only sometimes works? The article argues it didn't really, but then--the Washington Post reports that post-torture, Khalid Sheik Mohammed turned himself into a freelance lecturer on all things al-Quaida. He may have given up no operational plans, since he had none to reveal, but his background and organizational material was voluminous.

Then the question is, if torture may work, sometimes--should we do it? Even though it is contrary to the principles on which the country was founded, principles for which we stand--the respect for the autonomy of the individual, the right against self-incrimination, fundamental rights born of the Enlightenment, enshrined in our Constitution?

Phillip Zelikow has argued in these pages that the Justice Department torture rationale extends beyond foreigners, and could well apply to US citizens. Why just terrorists? Why not domestic kidnappers? Or child molesters, to find out all their victims? Are we ready to throw out the right against self-incrimination, as impractical? I for one do not want to see this debate, because I don't think we are up to it. Justice O'Connor has said: America is "forgetting" what we are all about. A debate on when torture is okay would mean a debate on throwing out our founding principles, by people who have "forgotten." Its hard to argue against practicality--they might win.