Former Vice President Dick Cheney asserted recently that President Barack Obama is the worst commander in chief the United States has ever had, that he is trying to take America down, “to fundamentally weaken our position in the world … to turn our back on our allies and encourage our adversaries.”
Cheney is outraged because Obama is negotiating with Iran, when he and the neoconservatives would rather fight than talk. They share the views of congressional Republicans who are allied with Benjamin Netanyahu in trying to sabotage P5+1 negotiations over Iran’s nuclear program.
They see Iran as an existential threat to Israel because of its anti-Israel rhetoric and a program that could potentially develop nuclear weapons. The program is mostly underground and would probably be impossible to eliminate with air strikes, but they would nonetheless like to replay Israel’s 1981 attack on Iraq’s Osirak reactor.
Cheney is among the most strident of the neoconservatives, a group known for their militant foreign policy views and personal aversion to military service, for which they have been labeled “chickenhawks.”
Cheney, for example, obtained five deferments during Vietnam, including a 3-A deferment for fathers with children. Prior to Oct. 6, 1965, married men were usually exempted. After that date, childless married men, such as Cheney, were liable to be drafted. He became a father nine months and two days after the policy was changed, according to The New York Times. As Cheney told The Washington Post, “I had other priorities in the 60’s than military service.”
Cheney is also the only vice president found guilty of war crimes. In May 2012, the Kuala Lumpur War Crimes Commission convicted former President George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, and seven members of their administration in absentia of torture and cruel and inhuman treatment of prisoners. Their names were forwarded to the International Criminal Court and the U.N. Security Council with the request that they be entered in the commission’s public Register of War Criminals. That could make them liable to arrest if they leave the U.S.
The idea of preemptive attack in pursuit of U.S. superiority originated with Paul Wolfowitz’s draft Defense Planning Guidance (DPG) for Defense Secretary Dick Cheney in 1992, which critics termed a “Pax Americana.” It lists defending Israel as a key goal of our Middle East strategy.
(A version of this piece appeared in the Mankato MN Free Press.)
In 1996, a group of neocons, many of them affiliated with the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA), a U.S. think tank of which Cheney was a board member, urged newly elected Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to make a “clean break” from the Oslo accords with the Palestinians.
They argued that Israeli security would be served best by regime change in surrounding countries, including Iraq, Palestine, Lebanon, Syria, and Iran. Their view was that American force and a tough Israeli line on the Arabs would make Israel safe and bring stability to the Middle East.
In 1998, 30 neocons sent an open letter to Clinton advocating the overthrow of Saddam, the most immediate threat, because he previously had both nuclear and biological weapons programs, dismantled by UNSCOM between 1991 and 1995. They believed he would reconstitute them underground and that only an invasion could find them.
Based on my experience working with the neocons, I believe that was the main motivation behind the 2003 invasion of Iraq, one of the greatest foreign policy disasters in U.S. history. As Philip Zelikow, a Neocon himself and the executive director of the 9/11 Commission said “(T)he ‘real threat’ from Iraq was not a threat to the United States. The ‘unstated threat’ was the ‘threat against Israel.’
George W. Bush, urged on by Cheney, endorsed the neocons’ Iraq invasion, using 9/11 and weapons of mass destruction as justification. Bush’s messianic views may have played a role; he reportedly told Jacques Chirac in 2003 that he had “a mission from God” to attack Iraq because the Biblical Gog and Magog were threatening Israel.
But Iraq was only the beginning. When Gen. Wesley Clark visited the Pentagon after 9/11, he found that the neocons were planning to invade to invade Iraq, Iran, Syria, Lebanon, Sudan, Libya and Somalia to install governments less hostile to Israel. The Neocons are in no danger of running out of wars to fight, even if they have to trot out Ahmad Chalabi, “Curveball” and phony WMD claims.
In fact, the U.S. and Israel have bombed or invaded Sudan, Somalia, Syria, Yemen, Pakistan, Iraq, Afghanistan, Lebanon, Libya and Gaza, part of an extended campaign to make the Middle East safe for Israel. Now the Neocons are openly agitating to attack a 10th country, Iran.
The Bush/Cheney cabal has created enough mayhem in the Middle East. We can’t let Netanyahu and the neocons drag us into another war on Israel’s behalf.