Dick Cheney has piped up about Obama Administration failures in Benghazi when no one on Earth is more culpable for the misery of US wars and conflicts since the end of the Cold War than he. I pray for the poor heart imprisoned in that man's chest--it has got to be a very frigid place. The judgment of history has begun to catch up with Cheney through works like Michael Isikoff and David Corn's "Hubris: The Inside Story of Spin, Scandal, and the Selling of the Iraq War", as well as the Rachel Maddow-narrated documentary condensing the book for television. But there seems to be a no mans land of time historians have not yet bridged confining the disgraceful Cheney legacy to just his Vice Presidency. There are dots crying out for connection to his time as US Secretary of Defense during which his original black heart influenced another President Bush. This man now puts himself forward as judge and jury on the Benghazi tragedy when there is more than good reason to ask if he alone earns distinction as America's most dastardly villain and the single catalyst that has brought America to multiple wars and made her a target of retribution long after he runs out of hearts.
The 9/11 Commission falls terribly short on a most critical issue: motive. Osama Bin Laden himself responded to the assertion that "they hate us for our freedom" by saying if that is so, why did I not attack Sweden? No, there were precipitating events and always Cheney at the forefront.
As a newbie here on Daily KOS I've been advised to keep it short if I wish to be read. How does one make a case in a paragraph or two that as Secretary of Defense under the first President Bush, Cheney bucked the palpable spirit of deliverance which came with the fall of the Berlin Wall and cheer-led America into an invasion of Panama which echoed throughout the world that if you're unhappy with your neighbors, it's now OK to invade them. Subsequently Saddam Hussein did exactly that. And though President G.H.W. Bush talked up the return of Hitler, his decision to effectively give up in the middle of the first Iraq war implied that his heart really wasn't in it. Whose heart was it that was fully in it? Was Bush I cheer-led by Cheney into the first Iraq war, just as Bush II had been cheer-led by Cheney into the second?
Who is to ask and when? But one thing is certain, Osama Bin Laden turned his hostility on the United States in largest part because the Saudi Royal family allowed beer-drinking, pork-eating, towel-head hating infidel Americans to station air bases in Saudi Arabia wherefrom to fly sorties into Iraq and bomb fellow Muslims despite Bin Laden's disapproval of Iraq's secular President Saddam Hussein. What evidence is there? Well, try the first World Trade Center attack on for size. No one expected Ross Perot to split the republican vote and oust President Bush I in favor of Clinton. The fact that the first WTC bombing came only one month after Bush left office belies a want for a political statement to have been made while Bush I was still in the big chair. Was there haste in that attack? Timing implies so. They could have waited for any other time than a month after Bush's surprising ouster. Cheney's reign as super-power cheerleader and American Empire builder had ended as well. But that dream of crushing Iraq and planting the American flag there for good lived on. And rest as they are saying is history.
If there were no Cheney, arguably there would have been no first Iraq war. And without the war being prosecuted from Saudi Arabia, the home of Bin Laden himself and fifteen of the nineteen 9/11 hijackers, there would have been no retribution in the form of two WTC attacks, one of which succeed and changed the world for the very much worse. Look not to Benghazi or to Secretary Clinton or President Obama, Mr. Cheney--to thine own self be true.