What’s different about 2002-2003 and 1994? It’s a question anyone watching this old interview still asks [like John Stewart did when Stephen Hayes was on his show pushing his book, Cheney]. It wasn’t that long ago. By 1998, the Project for the New American Century sent Clinton a letter advocating "regime change" in Iraq. Cheney didn’t sign that particular letter, but it’s no question that he was deeply a part of that "think tank." And, by the time the letter was sent, he was equally deeply in league with the oil barons as CEO of Halliburton. But, whatever his later motives, the point of revisiting this mammoth discrepancy is to point out that behind that deep voice and confident manner, Dick Cheney is a man whose seemingly thoughtful facade is a guise for a garden variety opportunist [and a major league narcissist].
In 1994, he was standing behind the decision of George H.W. Bush, his former boss, to pass on capturing Baghdad and unseating Hussein in the First Gulf War [at least back then, we would have had a reason]. I expect, Cheney believed what he was saying. Recall that 1994 is after Clinton was in office, and the year before Cheney went to work for Halliburton. At the time, he was at the American Enterprise Institute. In 1995, he fell into cahoots with the oil barons and gave speeches that the future of oil resources was in the Persian Gulf. It takes little imagination to understand what changed his mind about going to war with Iraq.
When Jon Stewart asked Hayes about this, he says that Cheney would say things changed after 9/11. That is, of course, just a typical Dick Cheney answer. We know that it’s not true from countless sources. Cheney was head over heels in love with “regime change” in Iraq before he was elected Vice President and before 9/11. We know that he was very invested in the Niger forgeries and the Aluminum Tubes fraud to talk up the non-existent WMD cache in Iraq. We know he told us that it would be a walk in the park, that we’d be greeted as liberators, that the war would be over in a short time. When Stewart asked Hayes about that, Hayes said that Cheney acknowledged that it was harder than they thought it would be. I applaud Stewart for repeatedly pointing out that Cheney has not ever really come clean in his public speeches, never reconciled his 1994 view with his modern rhetoric.
We’re about to get bombarded with pro-war speeches as the “September Reports” are given. A lot of those speeches will come from Cheney. I expect the media to [finally] join our abject skepticism. But most of all, I hope that some honest insiders come out of the closet and tell the world about the back office deliberations that have lead to this mammoth betrayal by people in high places – notably, Richard B. Cheney – a man who starts with conclusions and then bends whatever reality he can distort to fit them.
What happened on 9/11, the attacks on New York, those falling towers, changed things forever for all of us. But to use those times to put into action a pre-existing and superfluous plan to invade Iraq remains an act of treason. We needed leaders in that year afterwards – someone who would point us in a direction that gave us some resolution to our national trauma. What we got were leaders who took advantage of our grief and outrage and led us on a wild goose chase. Worse than that, the path they chose was one they’d already plotted as part of some neoconservative fantasy that was misdirected at best – more likely driven by nefarious motives. Now, we are a country divided with nothing to show for the last six years except the death of our reputation in the world, the deaths of thousands [many our own], and the death of the spirit of our Constitution. Many of us are more afraid of what our own government will do than of Iran or al Qaeda. Dick Cheney was and is at the center of these errors. The 9/11 attack was a national trauma that brought us together. President Bush and Vice President Cheney have been the architects of a national trauma that’s splintered us almost beyond recognition. If that weren’t enough, they’re pointing towards making things even worse. And they’ve so misused 9/11 in their rhetoric that we’ve almost forgotten what it really was, or how we all felt…
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