Dear Commons Community,

New York Times columnist Charles Blow calls out former Vice President Dick Cheney for chiding President Obama on his handling of the latest Iraq insurgent problem.

Here is an excerpt from his column:

 
“The situation in Iraq is truly worrisome, as militants threaten to tear the country asunder and disrupt the fragile, short-lived period absent all-out war there. We have strategic interests in preventing Iraq from unraveling, not least of which is that we don’t need the country to become a haven for terrorists, particularly those who might see America as a target.And of course, there is the uneasy subject of oil: Volatility in the region has already sent global oil prices soaring. On Wednesday, militants were said to have taken control of Iraq’s largest oil refinery.
We have to tread carefully here. There are no saints to be seen in this situation. Everyone’s hands are bloody. And, we don’t want to again get mired in a conflict in a country from which we have only recently extricated ourselves. As we weigh our response, one of the last people who should say anything on the subject is a man who is partly responsible for the problem.But former Vice President Dick Cheney, who was in the administration that deceived us into a nine-year war in Iraq, just can’t seem to keep his peace.

In an Op-Ed published with his daughter, Liz, in The Wall Street Journal on Tuesday, the Cheneys write:

 
“Rarely has a U.S. president been so wrong about so much at the expense of so many.” This, from the man who helped lead us into this trumped-up war, searching for nonexistent weapons of mass destruction, a war in which some 4,500 members of the American military were killed, many thousands more injured, and that is running a tab of trillions of dollars.

During the lead-up to the war, Mr. Cheney said to Tim Russert: “I really do believe that we will be greeted as liberators.” Nothing could have been further from the truth.
Even if it were indeed rare to be “so wrong,” as Mr. Cheney puts it, he was vice president in an administration that was much more tragically wrong. His whole legacy is wrapped in wrong.”
Blow’s conclusion:
“Mr. Cheney is still trying to bend history toward an exoneration of his guilt and an expunging of his record. But history, on this, is stiff, and his record is written in blood.”

As Colin Powell is famously quoted as advising President George W. Bush on invading Iraq: “If you break it, you own it.” Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and their Neocon cohorts set the stage for this never ending saga in Iraq.  The blood of this situation is indeed on their hands .

Tony