The Politics of Lying

The former vice president of the United States wants to make us forget that his criminal administration ended in failure. In all likelihood, he is the senior official who has done the most damage to the United States.

After a brief period of verbal abstinence, Dick Cheney, the former vice president under George W. Bush, seems to have returned to life with more strength than Frankenstein.

I recognize that comparing Cheney to Frankenstein could seem unjust. After all, Frankenstein, the monster invented by Mary Shelley, is a victim of his circumstance and only resorts to crime as a means of revenge after being ostracized, tormented and discriminated against.

Cheney is another type of monster. In all likelihood, he is probably the vice president that has done the most damage to the United States, because he is jointly responsible for the deaths of thousands of American soldiers and Iraqi civilians caused by unfounded speculation.

In addition, he is one of the principal authors of the current disaster in Iraq; furthermore, he is a pathological liar who is attempting to politically resurrect himself by blaming President Obama for the chaos in Iraq and by proposing that the country enact a renewed military intervention.

Even though you may not believe it, the ex-vice president of the Bush administration, who was known for the lies that he repeated over and over again during his eight years in office, now wants to become the architect of the foreign policy platform of the Republican Party in the 2016 presidential election.

The Lie

Neither the message nor the messenger has changed. He is the same Cheney who lied when he said there were ties between the terrorists of Sept. 11, 2001 and the government of Saddam Hussein; who lied again when he suggested that there was a terrorist alliance between Hussein and al-Qaida; who continued lying when he assured that there was “irrefutable evidence” that Hussein had reconstituted his nuclear program; and again when he repeated that U.S. intelligence proved, without a doubt, that Hussein possessed so-called “weapons of mass destruction.” Today, Cheney tries to elude responsibility for his actions by blaming Obama for the disaster, which the entire world predicted would happen when the Bush-Cheney team insisted on overthrowing the dictator that kept order by force on the now uncontrollable ethnic-religious groups that are fighting in Iraq.

Curiously, just a few years before, when the father of George W., George H. W. Bush, was president and Cheney was his secretary of defense, Cheney’s opposition to the invasion of Baghdad in the First Gulf War was critical. It was he who argued that the occupation would be a disaster, that it would cause civil war, and that U.S. troops wouldn’t have an exit strategy. In other words, he foretold the calamities that he would later deny when he and President Bush irresponsibly arranged the Iraq invasion.

In his futile attempt to return to the political spotlight, Cheney hopes to make us overlook the survey results, which illustrate that he, as well as his boss, ended that presidential period with the lowest approval rating since the Gallup poll began implementing polls more than seven decades ago. But the data are there; Bush ended his presidential period with a disapproval rating of 73 percent, and Cheney ended his term as vice president with an approval rating of 13 percent.

For Cheney, this is a trivial setback. What does it matter what people think of a man who has built his political career on lies?

What Cheney wants is for us to ignore that when he was president of the Halliburton Company, he harshly criticized President Bill Clinton when the latter attempted to impose sanctions on Iran — a then-important client of the company. Cheney’s argument, at the time, was that God had made a mistake by providing oil and gas to countries without democratic governments.

He would also like us to forget that, thanks to the U.S. invasion of Iraq, Halliburton received a contract for more than $1 billion.

For Cheney, following the bidding of the vast majority of American citizens and removing the troops from Iraq and Afghanistan is an act of isolationism. Refusing to pursue a direct intervention in Libya and instead obtaining the support of other countries to overthrow the dictator Moammar Gadhafi, as Obama successfully did, is “beneath” the United States.

But Cheney’s darts have other targets within his own party — primarily Senator Rand Paul, who seems to be contemplating a presidential candidacy in 2016 and who opposes the militaristic adventurism of Cheney, Rick Perry, John McCain and Lyndsey Graham.

According to Cheney, the central axis of the Republican Party’s national security strategy should be interventionist activism because, according to him, “Isolationism is crazy.”

After September 11, says Cheney, no one believed that the United States could adopt an isolationist policy. When I hear Cheney saying this nonsense, I long for the question that the king of Spain yelled at the impertinent Hugo Chavez: “Why don’t you shut up?”