I’m not reading Dick Cheney’s new memoir (I’m not paying for it, anyway) but I know from George Will that the 565- page book contains no apologies for anything. My first thought is that, at 565 pages, no conservatives are going to read it either. If there’s one thing the health care debate taught me, it’s that the Republicans do not like to read anything longer than three pages. George Will thinks the former vice-president should apologize for sending our country to war under false pretenses. This is a small degree of progress. This isn’t some b.s. about ‘everyone thought he had W.M.D.’ as if that were the reason we invaded Iraq. This is much closer to the ‘Cheney Lied, People Died’ truth of the matter.
“The truth is that for reasons that have a lot to do with the U.S. government bureaucracy, we settled on the one issue that everyone could agree on which was weapons of mass destruction as the core reason [for invading Iraq],” [Paul] Wolfowitz was quoted as saying in a Pentagon transcript of an interview with Vanity Fair.
The truth is that Dick Cheney convinced George W. Bush that Saddam Hussein had to go. I don’t think Dubya needed a whole lot of convincing. Those two made that one simple decision and then ran into the problem that they had no legal basis for waging a war of aggression. No legal basis meant no allies. The “reasonable” people in the Bush administration were successful in driving this point home, with a healthy assist from the Blair Government in London. Cheney counseled ignoring the United Nations and eschewing any allies. We didn’t need any excuses to kick some ass. Bush finally ruled against him and agreed that we would need some justification beyond hurt pride to invade a large oil-rich nation on the other side of the world. This is when everyone got together and decided to say that Saddam had a buttload of weapons of mass destruction and no qualms about handing them out to al-Qaeda. The Big Lie used to sell the war wasn’t a lie Dick Cheney originally wanted to tell. He just wanted to say Saddam Hussein was directly implicated in the 9/11 attacks, continued to mean to do us harm, and be done with it. George Will was perfectly willing to go along with that.
GEORGE WILL (ABC 10/28/01): The administration knows he’s vowed, Hussein has vowed revenge, he has anthrax, he loves biological weapons, he has terrorist training camps, including 747’s to practice on…
It was Cheney (and/or Cheney’s guys) who told George Will all that baloney. Did he buy it because he believed it (useful idiot) or because he’s a witting agent (as guilty as anyone)? I don’t know. All I know is that now he wants an apology.
WILL: Five hundred and sixty five pages and a simple apology would have been in order in some of them. Which is to say, the great fact of those eight years is we went to war—big war, costly war—under false pretenses. And…to write a memoir in which you say essentially nothing seriously went wrong…if I wrote a memoir of my last week, I would have things to apologize for.
George Will is right. He has plenty to apologize for. One of those things is acting like we’re stupid and irresponsible for not believing a word Dick Cheney has to say. How many people have died and how much money has been burned because Dick Cheney convinced the president that we had to do yet another land invasion in Asia? George Will should contemplate the magnitude of this error and compare it to the kind of small-ball bullshit he dedicates most of time to complaining about. He should also do a personal inventory over what mistakes he’s made and start making some amends. Dick Cheney made him look bad. He can start by apologizing to America for parroting Cheney’s talking points.
