The U.S. benefit from the war in Iraq was that we eliminated the potential for al-Qaeda to get their hands on weapons of mass destruction from Saddam Hussein, according to Dick Cheney…weapons he did not have to begin with.
“…That was the threat after 9/11 and when we took down Saddam Hussein we eliminated Iraq as a potential source of that.”
Cheney is delusional. He must know that the doctrine of war that says a nation can attack another to “eliminate” a “potential source” of danger is the same doctrine of war that the Nazis were prosecuted for after WWII.
Frankly, most contemporary analogies to Hitler or the Nazis are hyperbolic and irrational. But here it is all too appropriate. Cheney has openly argued for the legitimacy of Nazi war crime rationales on national television.
Beyond that, Cheney commits the crime of defying basic logic. Saddam Hussein had no weapons of mass destruction (something I’ve argued Cheney and Bush knew at the time), so the preventive attack from the U.S. could not have eliminated that threat because it didn’t exist.
Moreover, al-Qaeda didn’t have a presence in Iraq to speak of prior to the U.S. invasion, which caused jihadists to flood the country. The threat the U.S. faced from al-Qaeda was magnified immeasurably as a result of the U.S. attack, not the other way around. Indeed, the remnants of al-Qaeda in Iraq are still fighting the U.S.-backed dictatorship in Baghdad and have expanded to Syria where there is a real risk of their gaining control over territory and military resources.
Trillions of dollars, thousands of dead Americans, hundreds of thousands of dead Iraqis, and millions upon millions of lives ripped apart…mostly because of the delusions dancing around in this sorry old man’s head.
[h/t Scott Horton]