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One important job for the next president will be to dig into Dick Cheney’s White House bunker and to learn exactly what kind of hallucinatory vapors the Veep has been inhaling for the past eight years.
This is the guy who insisted we go to war in Iraq because Saddam Hussein definitely had weapons of mass destruction. He also promised that the Iraqi people would greet our troops as liberators. And he’s the guy who declared three years ago that Iraq’s deadly insugency was in its “last throes.”
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Thousands of people have died because of Cheney’s fantasies – and now he’s fantasizing again. Cheney recently popped into Baghdad for a quickie photo op and pep talk, asserting that things are going splendidly there. A “successful endeavor,” he crowed. “Well worth the effort,” he proclaimed. And he added that our military and political efforts were “phenomenal” and “remarkable.”
Phenomenal? On the very day of his drop-in, a roadside bomb killed two more American soldiers, bringing our nation’s loss to nearly 4,000 deaths. That same day, a woman detonated her suicide vest in an area of cafes and shops, killing at least 40 Iraqi civilians and wounding 65 others.
Remarkable? The day before Cheney’s rosy assessment of progress, the Red Cross issued a report detailing a humanitarian crisis in Iraq because of dire living conditions, including unsafe drinking water, lack of electricity, and a scarcity of health care. On the last point, of 34,000 doctors who were in Iraq prior to the invasion, about 2,000 have been killed and 20,000 more have left the country. “The Iraqi health care system is now in worse shape than ever,” states the Red Cross.
Cheney, who has none of his loved ones at risk in this war, insists that “victory” will be ours if only we stay in Iraq in perpetuity, committing ever more American lives, treasure and reputation to his fantasy.