Once again, the Dick Cheney Snarl™ is in evidence as he promotes his fascist view that any kind of dissent is unpatriotic and emboldens terrorists.
Vice President Cheney said today that the ongoing national debate over the war in Iraq is emboldening adversaries to believe they can undermine the resolve of the American people to complete the U.S. mission in Iraq and Afghanistan.
“They can’t beat us in a stand-up fight, they never have, but they’re absolutely convinced they can break our will [and that] the American people don’t have the stomach for the fight, ” Cheney said on NBC’s Meet the Press.
The vice president said U.S. allies in Afghanistan and Iraq “have doubts” America will finish the job there. “And those doubts are encouraged, obviously, when they see the kind of debate that we’ve had in the United States,” Cheney said. “Suggestions, for example, that we should withdraw U.S. forces from Iraq simply feed into that whole notion, validates the strategy of the terrorists.”
So, Cheney is saying that no one should ever question his war. How very American of him.
On top of this, he goes on to say:
the fact that al-Qaeda has launched no successful attack on American soil since Sept. 11, 2001, shows that the administration’s policies are working, especially, as he described it, in going on the offensive in Afghanistan and Iraq.
“I don’t know how you can explain five years of no attacks, five years of successful disruption of attacks, five years . . . of defeating the efforts of al-Qaeda to come back and kill more Americans,” Cheney said. “You’ve got to give some credence to the notion that maybe somebody did something right.”
Another logical fallacy that somehow they manage to slip past the American people’s intelligence (such as it is). The administration claims that since there hasn’t been a terrorist attack on the scale of September 11 since that day, they are to be credited with preventing them. By this same logic, the fact that there has been no major earthquake in the San Francisco bay area since 1989 is evidence that FEMA is doing something right. I mean, there were eight years between the two attacks on the World Trade Center; but Cheney wishes us all to imagine that there are attacks planned every day and somehow the Cheney League of America is disrupting them all.
During the interview, Cheney continued to make the argument that there was a relationship between Hussein and al-Qaeda going back at least a decade before the U.S. invasion. He asserted that the now-deceased al-Qaeda operative Abu Musab al-Zarqawi fled Afghanistan and “set up operations in Baghdad in the spring of ’02 and was there from then, basically, until basically the time we launched into Iraq.”
But a newly declassified report released Friday by the Senate Intelligence Committee found that the Central Intelligence Agency, by October 2005, had debunked the idea that there was any pre-war relationship between Zarqawi and Hussein’s government. The report said the CIA assessment concluded that the government “did not have a relationship, harbor or turn a blind eye toward Zarqawi and his associates.”
Cheney said he had not read the report.
We’ve all known that there was no connection for years. And Cheney has been saying there was a connection for years. What else is he lying about?
And, um, he hasn’t read the report? Let’s see. They don’t read newspapers at the White House. They didn’t read the infamous “Bin Laden seeks to fly planes into buildings” memo. And they didn’t read the report that said Iraq had nothing to do with September 11.
Do they know how to read over there?
I offer this image of George W. Bush being told about the attack on the World Trade Center — after which he continued to sit with a bizarre look on his face, doing nothing:
Please notice what is written on the bulletin board behind him — something he should have read (if he knows how to read): it says “Reading Makes a Country Great!” Irony?
Meanwhile, as they ramp up their rhetoric designed to make us believe that they are keeping us safe [we’re not unsafe, terrorism is not a big threat to us statistically], it’s worth noting the following:
The clandestine U.S. commandos whose job is to capture or kill Osama bin Laden have not received a credible lead in more than two years. Nothing from the vast U.S. intelligence world — no tips from informants, no snippets from electronic intercepts, no points on any satellite image — has led them anywhere near the al-Qaeda leader, according to U.S. and Pakistani officials.
“The handful of assets we have have given us nothing close to real-time intelligence” that could have led to his capture, said one counterterrorism official, who said the trail, despite the most extensive manhunt in U.S. history, has gone “stone cold.”
But in the last three months, following a request from President Bush to “flood the zone,” the CIA has sharply increased the number of intelligence officers and assets devoted to the pursuit of bin Laden. The intelligence officers will team with the military’s secretive Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) and with more resources from the National Security Agency and other intelligence agencies.
The problem, former and current counterterrorism officials say, is that no one is certain where the “zone” is.
… After playing down bin Laden’s importance and barely mentioning him for several years, Bush last week repeatedly invoked his name and quoted from his writings and speeches to underscore what Bush said is the continuing threat of terrorism.
In other words, they’ve failed miserably at this mission; Bush finally decided to actually put some resources into looking for him for the last three months because a bin Laden capture just before the midterm elections would seal the Republican majority.
