1 Boring Old Man

Liz Cheney’s group ‘Keep America Safe’ takes on ‘radical’ White House
Politico
By BEN SMITH
10/13/09

Former Vice President Dick Cheney’s eldest daughter Liz will launch a new group aimed at rallying opposition to the “radical” foreign policy of the Obama administration which it says has succeeded only in undermining the nation’s security. The new group, Keep America Safe, will make the case against President Barack Obama’s moves to wrench America away from Bush era foreign policy on issues from detaining alleged terrorists at Guantanamo Bay to building a missile shield in Eastern Europe.

“The policies being proposed by the Obama administration are so radical across the board,” Cheney said. “Whether you’re a Republican or a Democrat, you want the nation to be strong and so many steps this president is taking are making the nation weaker.”

The new group will add institutional heft to a scathing critique of Obama articulated first and loudest by Liz Cheney’s father, and fills a void left by a Republican Party made skittish by the Iraq War, and apparently more eager to engage the president on domestic issues like health care. Its formation marks the end of an unusual partisan truce on America’s central national security challenge, Afghanistan, and after a presidential campaign in which Obama and Republican John McCain agreed on many security issues from Central Asia to Guantanamo Bay.

Keep America Safe will focus on issues like troop levels, missile defense, detainees, and interrogation, according to Liz Cheney, who is heading the group along with Weekly Standard editor William Kristol and Debra Burlingame, the hawkish sister of an American Airlines pilot killed in the September 11 attacks…

The Maginot Line [maÊ’i’no]: The Ligne Maginot, named after French Minister of Defense André Maginot, was a line of concrete fortifications, tank obstacles, artillery casemates, machine gun posts, and other defenses, which France constructed along its borders with Germany and Italy, in the light of experience from World War I, and in the run-up to World War II. Generally the term describes only the defenses facing Germany, while the term Alpine Line is used for the Franco-Italian defenses. The French established the fortification to provide time for their army to mobilize in the event of attack and/or to entice Germany to attack neutral Belgium to avoid a direct assault on the line. The success of static, defensive combat in World War I was a key influence on French thinking. The fortification system successfully dissuaded a direct attack. However, it was an ineffective strategic gambit, as the Germans did indeed invade Belgium, flanked the Maginot Line, and proceeded relatively unobstructed. It is a myth however that the Maginot line ended at the Belgian border and was easy to circumvent. The fortifications were connected to the Belgian fortification system, of which the strongest point was Fort Eben-Emael. The Germans broke through exactly at this fortified point with a unique assault that incorporated gliders and shaped explosive charges. The surrender of the fort, in less than two days, allowed the invasion of France.

Dick Cheney was appointed Secretary of Defense in 1989 and immediately began slashing the Defense budget [after the build-up by Ronald Reagan]. That’s quite a paradox in that a couple of years later, he was instructing Wolfowitz and Libby to write the Defense Guidance that basically escalated our military and its role in the world. By 1997, he was part of the Project for the New American Century that issued a report in early 2000 criticizing Clinton’s cuts in Defense spending and advocated a slew of new weapons [Rebuilding America’s Defenses: Strategy, Forces and Resources For a New Century]. That document advocated a vast outlay for weaponry that would never have prevented 9/11. And none of those weapons would have been of use to us in Afghanistan, Iraq, or the failed search for Bin Laden. They were weapons for defending against the then defunct Soviet Union. Likewise, Cheney’s PNAC and the Administration he was part of were hypervigilant about attacks from "rogue nations," but ignored clear warnings about the unaffiliated al Qaeda.

Now, his clone-daughter has taken up his cross to keep us safe by advocating increased "troop levels, missile defense, detainees, and interrogation." These are likewise anachronistic measures aimed at a previous enemy [or enemies] to prevent previous attacks or threats – a modern Maginot Line. Liz Cheney’s Keep America Safe campaign will be labeled as ways of justifying her father’s prior failures, or his cahoots with the military industrial complex, or preemption of his prosecution for war crimes, or his narcissism. I would agree with all of those possibilities. But there’s a driven quality to his fear and fear mongering [Keep America Safe Scared] that again suggests another explanation to me. Dick Cheney is scared in the "plaid shirt" way. He’s still in the Bunker from the morning of 9/11, and Liz is going down to join him – touching loyalty, but the wrong treatment…