President Dick Cheney is at it again! Cheney told Republicans on Tuesday that the United States needs to get back into the game in Iraq.
Cheney met with House GOP lawmakers to inform them that American security is jeopardized worldwide. He said that now is the time to act — and act big!
Rep. Peter King explained that President Obama has been saying for the past year that “we’re going to bring all the troops home, and that we’re going to basically be out of Iraq and Afghanistan,” but he claims that “Now the president’s basically saying, one way or the other, we’re going back into Iraq. Dick Cheney was here to support that.”
King was asked if he saw any irony in Cheney talking to Republicans about the next step regarding Iraq. “No, because most of us think we did the right thing in Iraq,” he said.
“Really [there was] no controversy over the comments that were made.” said Washington Rep. Dave Reichert. “No one challenged the vice president. I think that his analysis and the information he shared was accepted as pretty accurate.”
Cheney, of course, once again falsely linked Iraq to the 9/11 attacks, and used that to fearmonger a bit.
“He mentioned the 9/11 attack was accomplished by people who came to this country with airplane tickets and box cutters and killed over 3,000 people,” Reichert said. “What he said is that as ISIS and other terrorist groups — the Muslim Brotherhood, the Taliban, al Qaeda, etc. — gain strength and no action is taken or perceived weaknesses are seen, there’s a greater chance America could be attacked again, and this time it won’t be box cutters and airplane tickets.”
According to Illinois Republican Adam Kinzinger, Cheney “reiterated for us the importance of the Republican Party standing strong for a strong national defense. It was a great message, something we needed to hear. Hopefully it sticks with a lot of my colleagues who have kind of had this creep toward isolationism in the Congress lately.” He said that the former Vice President repeated the Republican lie, “our allies in the region don’t trust the President.”
Cheney did not discuss specifics, but sources say that “he did kind of lay out the dangers we have and that we need to meet them,” and “how unprepared the U.S. military is for any kind of large-scale engagement against ISIS because the administration is cutting the military so much.”
California Rep. Buck McKeon said, “What he talked about was we’ve, Republicans, have had a position on peace through strength. You look at all the Republican presidents we’ve had back to [Dwight] Eisenhower. You know they all understand, if you’re not strong, then you invite aggression. When you invite aggression, you end up with people getting killed.”
His advice was mainly to spend more money on the military,” said Kentucky Rep. Tom Massie.
It might seem surprising that Republicans would meet with, or listen to, Dick Cheney. However, he did come with a comfortable message: “Obama bad. 9/11. War on Terror. Let’s blow stuff up.”
