Former Vice President Dick Cheney’s been in the news a lot lately, from his defense of the Bush Administration’s torture policy to his recent voice of approval for same-sex marriage. This Politico story today again has him playing center stage, admitting there was no evidence of a link between Al Qaeda and Iraq:
‘On the question of whether or not Iraq was involved in 9/11, there was never any evidence to prove that,’ Cheney said during an interview Monday night with Fox News’ Greta Van Susteren.
It gets better.
The former vice president explained away the early uncertainty of the connection by insisting that intelligence gathering is “more an art form than a science,” pointing to several examples of past CIA failures.
I seem to remember Cheney’s scathing attack against the 9/11 Commission when it suggested that there was no shred of evidence connecting Saddam and 9/11.
Of course there was no evidence; Osama Bin Laden hated Saddam about as much as Saddam loved Joseph Stalin. Attempting to cover up this lie, Cheney ordered that detainees be tortured so that they would somehow produce proof of a link. Since Cheney was willing to manufacture information to sell the invasion, it begs the question on why some detainees were waterboarded hundreds of times in just days.
So why did we invade Iraq again? Oil? Well, not really. Nearly three million barrels of it a day is fed to the hummers and jets that are still patrolling the streets and skies of Iraqi cities, and have been for over six years now (oil for war, if you will). We are building an embassy in Baghdad bigger than the Vatican and staying for at least ten more years if Obama’s top generals get their way. The war was simply a good old-fashioned military occupation; empire for empire’s sake.
Which is why I was happy as anybody to see the Rethugicans get embarrassed in the last election. Unfortunately, we elected Obama and the Democrats, who claimed to be against the war, but are now finalizing a new $96.7 billion war funding bill.
You don’t hear too much about Iraq anymore since Obama get elected, and the news that the 5,000th U.S. soldier just died in Mesopotamia was met with a collective media shrug. 5,000 dead American soldiers may not seem that many compared to other wars, but in the first ten years of Vietnam, there were a little over 6,000 American deaths. More than 50,000 deaths later, we smartly pulled out, and the South fell. The civil wars and genocide that occurred as a result of the U.S. invasion and massive bombings of Southeast Asia faded, and now we trade extensively with Vietnam. Exiting Vietnam was better for all parties, and despite the supposed learned “lessons” from Vietnam, the exact same mistakes are being made.
The invasion of Iraq was based on an admitted lie, and its being continued and expanded by the Democrats on an admitted lie. Come to think of it, Afghanistan and Pakistan had nothing to do with 9/11 either, yet Obama is ordering that both of these countries be pummeled with even more U.S. air strikes anyway.
Not one, not two, but three possible Vietnams? As the body counts and the war funding rises, the chances grow with every passing day.
A Little Rebellion 