http://nypost.com/2014/09/25/barack-cheney-hello-darth-vader/Barack Cheney: Hello, Darth Vader
By William McGurn
September 25, 2014 | 9:01pm
Barack Obama has embraced his inner Dick Cheney. At least in words.
Gone is the candidate who assured us the mere fact of his election would change the course of the Middle East. Gone is the president who spoke of America’s “arrogance” on foreign soil.
Gone too are the rhetorical barnacles that usually attach to his assertions of force: timetables for withdrawal, declarations of what he won’t do, the idea that if we call a halt to war, so will the terrorists.
In its place, we have the President Obama we saw Wednesday at the United Nations talking about the Islamic State.
This Obama says, “There can be no reasoning — no negotiation — with this brand of evil.” This Obama talks about “taking out their leaders and denying them the safe havens they rely on.”
This Obama openly mocks the idea that if only Israelis would settle with the Palestinians, the Middle East would be as peaceful as Scarsdale.
It’s a huge comedown for a president who sees himself as the guy who gets us out of wars.
Still, one man isn’t surprised things haven’t turned out quite the way Obama had predicted. It’s old Darth Vader himself, Dick Cheney.
This week the former veep was in New York to address a gathering of Bush-Cheney alums. In a quiet room at the Union League Club just before he joined the party, Cheney minced no words about why President Obama has had to shift so dramatically.
“As I look at it,” he says, “he’s got a screwed-up worldview, and because his worldview doesn’t match reality he now has to change.”
It’s the kind of statement that drives Cheney’s enemies barking mad. That, plus his refusal to say the path he and George W. Bush forged after 9/11 was mistaken. He smiles before adding, “I have never apologized.”
And why should he?
Lost in the most heated debates of the Bush years — over weapons of mass destruction, enhanced interrogations, the National Security Agency’s terrorist surveillance program — is that the defining difference between the Bush-Cheney and Obama-Biden approaches was never about policies and tactics.
It was and is fundamentally philosophical, about the nature of the enemy and what that means for how we fight them.
Cheney notes Obama’s approach is not new. It’s the same one both Republican and Democratic administrations took before 9/11.
He rattles off a litany of attacks on Americans by Islamist terrorists that preceded that dark day in 2001: the World Trade Center in New York (1993); Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia (1996); our embassies in Kenya and Tanzania (1998); USS Cole (2000), and so on.
“All these attacks,” he says, “were basically dealt with as a law-enforcement issue.” For himself and President Bush, 9/11 changed everything. That day, he says, was a “clear dividing line.”
Say what you will about Cheney, even his most savage critics wouldn’t accuse him of tailoring his views to the latest polls. Partly as a result, a hostile press helped turn him into a caricature — a punchline on late-night TV to some, a war criminal to others.
Six years later, the veep’s views haven’t changed one bit. The world around him has.
When Bush and Cheney left office, they left behind a victory in Iraq. It was a nation where Shia and Sunni were fighting it out in their parliament instead of inflicting atrocities on each other.
Instead of leaving behind US forces to maintain the achievement, Obama declared mission accomplished and bugged out.
Now we have an Iraq where an al Qaeda offshoot beheads Americans and posts the videos online. For the nameless, defenseless ordinary Iraqi, it’s more horrifying still. Here’s how Sen. Dianne Feinstein described it on “Face the Nation” this week:
“I have a picture of what I estimate to be a 6-year-old girl in a gingham party dress, white tights, a little red band around her wrist, Mary Janes. And she’s lying on the ground and her head is gone.”
With each passing day Americans see a world that looks more like one Dick Cheney warned about — and less and less like the one President Obama’s entire foreign policy has been based on.
The tide of war is not in fact receding. Americans won’t be safe from terrorists if we wait for them to start beheading people before we consider them a threat. And a president can’t end a war simply by declaring it over.
Strategy and tactics can be debated. What Bush and Cheney got right was their diagnosis about the nature of the enemy, the challenge Islamist terrorism poses to America and the Middle East — and what we need to do to prevail.
“I don’t think the Obama crowd ever bought that,” Cheney says.
He’s right about that, too.
