I'm not sure what part of it is that Nancy disagreed with. She accused me of questioning her patriotism. I didn't question her patriotism. I questioned her judgment. Al-Qaeda functions on the basis that they think they can break our will. That's their fundamental underlying strategy. My statement was that if we adopt the Pelosi policy, that we will validate the strategy of al-Qaeda. I said it, and I meant it. And I'm not backing down.Having your judgment questioned by Cheney must be a bit like having your intelligence insulted by a sea cucumber. (Or, as Jonathan Zasloff observes, having your racial sensitivity questioned by a longtime congressional defender of apartheid.)
-- Vice President Dick Cheney, February 23, 2007
Cheney is a joke. An embarrassment the White House has struggled for years to keep out of sight and muzzled. The kind of guy you send on a trip to Australia, which used to be an actual criminal punishment before the invention of airplanes. The only element of Pelosi's judgment I would question at all was her initial response to Cheney's first attack. It was during an earlier ABC interview that Cheney claimed that "if we were to do what Speaker Pelosi and Congressman Murtha are suggesting, all we'll do is validate the al-Qaeda strategy." All Pelosi needed to do in response was note that if Dick Cheney thinks she and Murtha are badly wrong, they must be on the right track.
This is "Twenty-Nine Percent Approval" Cheney we're talking about. There was no need to "hope the President will repudiate and distance himself from the Vice President's remarks." She should have just smeared Cheney's remarks all over the White House and driven home the point that, in opposing Democratic efforts to change the course in Iraq, Bush is once again taking Cheney's advice -- a strategic approach that works exactly never.
Remember, Cheney also "cited the recent push by Iraqi forces to crack down on insurgent activity in Baghdad" as a success. Only the interview in which he did that was conducted on May 30, 2005. The same one, famously, in which he explained that "they're in the last throes, if you will, of the insurgency."
If I will!
About one year and nine months later, remarkably enough, the rotting corpse of the insurgency is still there, twitching madly. Why, they managed to kill forty people at Baghdad University on Sunday, and thirty-six on Saturday, in the weekend's two major bombings. Hilariously, as of June 2006 Cheney was still defending his "last throes" remark, further cementing his reputation as a man whose track record of dishonesty, catastrophically poor judgments, and world-historical stubbornness makes the rest of the Bush administration look reasonable.
A trip through the Cheney historical record is always fun, but on the subject of validating the strategy of al-Qaeda, one only needs to look back just a couple of weeks to recall the new Mid-East strategy of the Bush administration. The idea, you'll remember, was to focus American diplomatic and political efforts throughout the region on countering not al-Qaeda, but … Iran. This is the same Iran that keeps trying to negotiate with us. The one where, unlike in many Muslim countries, Osama bin Laden is incredibly unpopular. The one that's actually getting attacked by groups with ideological affinities to al-Qaeda and operational links to the same regions of Afghanistan where al-Qaeda and Taliban elements still lurk.
The Cheney strategy involves the following: Having decided to go after Saddam Hussein rather than al-Qaeda and open up a field for al-Qaeda activity in Iraq, we need to maintain a massive troop presence in Iraq that promotes Sunni toleration of an otherwise unpopular foreign al-Qaeda element. We also need to pretend to believe that deliberate Iranian policy is an important source of Sunni Arab insurgent weaponry, even though we know perfectly well that the Iranians are trying to arm Shiite militias and that all sorts of weapons sloshing around Iraq (including, of course, lots of American weapons, plus weapons from our allies in the anti-Iranian cause) wind up in insurgent hands. Next, we need to rigorously ignore Iranian pleas that we work together with them against al-Qaeda, while actively discouraging Israel and Syria from bilateral discussions. Having thus isolated ourselves from as many potential allies against al-Qaeda as possible, we'll thus be well-positioned to, perhaps, launch another pointless war and once again try to blame its inevitable failures on those who point out problems rather than those who created them.
As an alternative, maybe it's time we stopped listening to Dick Cheney.
Matthew Yglesias is a Prospect staff writer.
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