Cheney does a poor imitation of a tough guy

I held off addressing the speech this week by former Vice President Dick Cheney until I had time to sit and watch it. (It’s included in its entirety on a video below.)

Having watched it, I must say the man hasn’t lost his ability to stun.

In places, Cheney is unintentionally hilarious. “We cannot protect this country by …  turning the guns on our own guys,” says the man who shot his pal Harry Whittington in the face.

And eight years after President Bush assured the world that he had looked Vladimir Putin in the eye and “found him to be very straightforward and trustworthy … I was able to get a sense of his soul,” Cheney tells us that “ anybody who has spent much time in that part of the world knows what Vladimir Putin is up to. And those who try placating him, by conceding ground and accommodating his wishes, will get nothing in return but more trouble.”

That Dick. What a joker.

Most of the attention has focused on Cheney’s suggestion that President Obama is  “dithering while America’s armed forces are in danger” and “waffling while our troops on the ground face an emboldened enemy.”  It is a startling line of attack. For seven long years,  the Bush/Cheney administration left the Afghanistan theater so starved for manpower, resources and leadership that U.S. forces were teetering on the edge of defeat by the time Obama took office.  In the 10 months since then, Obama has more than doubled the number of troops deployed in Afghanistan.

And what’s Cheney’s defense? Well, as he says in the speech, the Bush administration did leave Obama a plan.  After seven years, finally, a plan.

The implication that Obama is endangering the lives of U.S. troops is particularly outrageous. If the Bush administration had focused sufficient attention and resources on Afghanistan in its two terms in office, it is highly unlikely that American troops would still be dying there today, with no end in sight to the sacrifice.

Cheney acknowledges none of that. He shows not the slightest bit of humility over his role in the invasion of Iraq, the  single biggest foreign policy blunder  in the nation’s history and a decision that led directly to the deaths of thousands of American military personnel, with no strategic U.S. gain.  He makes no mention of the fact that the Baghdad adventure he championed left our forces in Afghanistan so undermanned.  And he wishes his listeners to forget that by Bush’s second term, the president had learned to turn a deaf ear to his vice president’s rantings, freezing him out of the decision-making process.

Given that documented history of incompetence, it’s downright laughable to see Cheney now lauded as a hero of sorts by advocates of a tough-guy foreign policy.  Cheney is not tough, he’s a poser. Many a weak soul has been eager to send other people off to die and kill.

I have always had deep misgivings about the “chickenhawk” label.  It transforms what ought to be a debate about policy into something more personal, which clouds the argument.  But  in this particular case, Cheney himself casts every foreign policy decision as a test of will and masculinity, rather than logic and experience. The chasm between the persona he tries to project and the actual life he has lived is simply too great to go unmentioned.

Back when Cheney was a young man and this nation was at war, he begged five times to be excused from the draft, and five times that request was granted. The last of those five deferments was particularly illuminating.  In October 1965, the Selective Service rules were changed for the first time to make married men eligible for the draft. Fathers, however, would still be exempt.

Exactly nine months and two days after that rule change, Cheney’s first child was born.

In closing, I should acknowledge that there is one important point on which I agree with our former vice president. As he said in his speech this week, “There are policy differences, and then there are affronts that have to be answered every time without equivocation, and this is one of them.”

Yes sir, that’s exactly right.