Cheney continues to piss on us and tell us it's raining

Cheney is so arrogant he believes that if he just keeps lying, Americans will believe him again. The gigs up, Dick. Cat's outta the bag.

The sanctions/no fly zone/inspections/occasional bombing policy worked. Iraq was not a meaningful threat to the U.S. It required patience and prudence, however, which are adult qualities Bush and his supposed "grown ups" just don't have. Let's bring those crazy Clinton kids back and order up some pizza and some relative peace.

Cheney Goes on Offensive Over Iraq

Saturday, October 11, 2003

Vice President Cheney capped a White House effort to regain its equilibrium over the Iraq occupation by delivering a blistering rebuttal yesterday to critics of the administration's foreign policy and arguing that a consensus-based foreign policy is obsolete.

After several weeks of domestic and international criticism of President Bush's policy of attacking potential threats, Cheney struck back forcefully by calling the U.N. Security Council's 50-year tradition of giving permanent members a veto a "policy of doing exactly nothing."

The vice president's acerbic speech went well beyond milder versions delivered in the past two days by Bush and national security adviser Condoleezza Rice. The address, to the Heritage Foundation in Washington, was the last of a trio of speeches designed to rebuild public support for the occupation of Iraq, which has been slipping because of ongoing violence, a lack of international support and a failure to find weapons of mass destruction.
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But while Bush asked the nation on Thursday to be more optimistic and look beyond the negative headlines from Iraq, Cheney barely mentioned the hardships in Iraq. Instead, he took aim at Democrats and foreign leaders, such as French President Jacques Chirac and U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan, who have raised objections to U.S. "unilateralism."
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"Though often couched in high-sounding terms of unity and cooperation, it is a prescription for perpetual disunity and obstructionism," Cheney said, adding that this would "confer undue power" on dissenters, "while leaving the rest of us powerless to act in our own defense. Yet we continue to hear this attitude in arguments in our own country -- so often, and so conveniently, it amounts to a policy of doing exactly nothing."

Cheney's speech was an uncompromising argument that far exceeded what other figures in the administration have asserted. Cheney, for example, dismissed a dozen years of inspections, patrolling of no-fly zones and strikes against military targets in Iraq, saying "all of these measures failed."

David Kay, the chief U.S. weapons inspector in Iraq, presented a different view in his congressional testimony last week. For example, he said: "Information found to date suggests that Iraq's large-scale capability to develop, produce, and fill new CW [chemical weapons] munitions was reduced -- if not entirely destroyed -- during Operations Desert Storm and Desert Fox, 13 years of U.N. sanctions and U.N. inspections."