Referring to the heroic efforts of the Royal Air Force pilots fighting the Battle of Britain in 1940, Winston Churchill spoke these famous words: “Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few.”
Fast forward nearly 74 years. Dick Cheney, the man who helped take America into an unnecessary war based on lies and fabrications, has the audacity to contort those immortal words into a cheap shot against President Obama’s policies in Iraq and elsewhere.
In a Wall Street Journal opinion piece, Cheney — one of the men responsible for the deaths of nearly 4,500 Americans in Iraq — headlines his piece (coauthored by Liz Cheney) with the words, “Rarely has a U.S. president been so wrong about so much at the expense of so many.”
This is the same man who, when asked in March 2008 — the Iraq war had then been raging for five years and had already killed nearly 4,000 and injured more than 29,000 of our men and women in uniform — what he thought about polls that indicated two-thirds of Americans believed that the war in Iraq was not worth fighting and that the cost in lives was not worth the gains, disdainfully responded with one single word, “So?” but now feels loquacious enough to write 1,000 words attacking a president who ended the war Cheney and his cohorts so nonchalantly started.
This is the same man who had “other priorities” than to serve his country, who asked for and received five deferments, who did not hesitate to send hundreds of thousands of our troops into harm’s way and who unrepentantly continues to demand more of the same.
Cheney’s piece is difficult to read without one’s stomach feeling somewhat nauseous and without one’s intelligence feeling assaulted.
Fortunately, Bob Cesca at the Daily Banter has “read Cheney’s jaw-dropping editorial on Obama and Iraq so you don’t have to,” which he summarizes as “an article so completely loaded with irony, contradictions and hypocrisy that it’ll be difficult to unpack without bloating this post into a novel-length volume” and proceeds to demolish Cheney’s hallucinations point by point.
No, notwithstanding Cheney’s perversion of Churchill’s solemn words, Cheney is no Churchill.
That great British leader committed his brave troops to battle to defend Britain and, eventually, the free world. Cheney did so to attack and invade a sovereign nation on a whim and a lie, for which we and the Iraqi people are still paying. History has judged one man already and history is already judging the other.
As Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid remarked:
If there’s one thing this country does not need, is that we should be taking advice from Dick Cheney on wars…Being on the wrong side of Dick Cheney is being on the right side of history. To the architects of the Iraq War who are now so eager to offer their expert analysis, I say, Mr. President, thanks, but no thanks. Unfortunately, we have already tried it your way and it was the biggest foreign policy blunder in the history of the country.
Lead photo Northfoto / Shutterstock.com>
