Liz Cheney's attack on Obama for his handling of disputes with Afghan President Hamid Karzai and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is really quite remarkable:
Afghan President Karzai, whose support we need if we are going to succeed in Afghanistan, is being treated to an especially dangerous and juvenile display from this White House. They dress him down publicly almost daily and refuse to even say that he is an ally. There is a saying in the Arab world: “It is more dangerous to be America's friend than to be her enemy.” In the age of Obama, that is proving true.
Cheney seems to believe that the United States has no reason to expect that countries that receive billions from American taxpayers -- or in the case of Afghanistan, the commitment of American soldiers -- should respond to U.S. interests. She's so consumed with scoring a hit on the president that she can't even be bothered to learn that Afghanistan is not an Arab country and that her hero Hamid Karzai is not an Arab. That's how deeply she cares about American foreign policy.
This is pretty much the essence of Cheneyism: brutality at the expense of facts and substance. Whether we're talking about promoting torture, her opposition to closing the national security liability that is the detention camp at Guantanamo Bay, or, in this case, Obama's attempts to hold Karzai accountable, the most important thing is the destruction of her enemies. Everything else -- details, consistency, the larger implications of how her arguments would affect U.S. foreign policy interests or society as a whole -- are completely irrelevant.
-- A. Serwer
