On Harball today, Chris Matthews was reviewing the love fest between John King and Dick Cheney this past Sunday. Matthews showed a clip of Cheney defending the war in Iraq by saying that we have met our goals there. By "our goals" he was referring to setting up an independent Democratic society. He clearly has a faulty memory because running around setting up Democracies was never our stated goal. I remember the talk of WMD's and ties to 9/11 and potential acquisition of nuclear technology (remember the famed yellow cake memo), but creating a "democratically governed Iraq" was not mentioned. John King never once called him on that fact on Sunday, but as the previous post by SJ pointed out, "journalists" no longer seem willing to speak the truth to power.I am getting away from my main point, Matthews had a couple of people on to comment on the interview and he asked them about the answer that Cheney had given regarding Iraq. I will now quote in full the responses of one of the pundits:
"What the Vice President overlooked was the price of this war. 4,000 dead Americans, 30,000 wounded, 100,000 dead Iraqis, 100,000 widows and kids without fathers, 4 million refugees, the Christian community cut to pieces over there with half of them driven into Syria. It's been a horribly costly thing. Those people would have been better off if we'd left them alone. I do not believe that we have the right to attack a country that has not threatened us, want war with us or attack us in order to deprive it of weapons it does not have"
This same pundit continued later:
"He (Saddam Hussein) was deterred. He was in a box by 2001. He was no threat to the United States of America. If he were a threat why didn't the Jordanians and Turks and the others want us to invade? Nobody over there wanted this war."
Fairly coherent arguments against the war and against the statements of the Vice President, I would say. It's not that we haven't said it before, but it's always nice to hear it from someone else. So who is the mystery man? You'll just have to wait until tomorrow. And no peaking.
1 comment:
That interview was just proof of more Dick Cheney lies. We all know the Iraq invasion had a number of goals: 1). Getting rid of Saddam Hussein, 2). Getting our hands, directly and/or indirectly, on Iraqi oil, 3). Establishing a long term (if not permanent) US military presence directly in the heart of the Middle East, and 4). The establishment of a pro-US satellite regime in Iraq. An added benefit was to provide hugely lucrative non-bid government contracts to Cheney's company, Halliburton, and its subsidiaries as well as friendly corporations who had made large donations to the Bush/Cheney election campaigns. As a charter member of the far right wing Project for A New American Century (along with Bush, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, and all the other usual crooks), Cheney had the Iraq invasion planned since the mid-'90s. Their website stated so. They were also planning strikes against Syria and Iran. Thank God they got bogged down in Iraq and left office! And I'm sure the reason King didn't hold Cheney's feet to the fire is that it's looking more each day that he and his wife, CNN reporter Dana Bash, are actually closet Republicans.
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