What, exactly, qualifies Dick Cheney as an expert on national security?
by Chris Edelson

It’s amazing that anyone takes Dick Cheney seriously, but since the traditional media has wildy miscast him as President Obama’s counterweight, it seems necessary to point out how absurd it is to take anything Dick Cheney has to say about national security seriously.

What is Cheney’s record on the subject?  First, he served in an administration that ignored a specific warning that Bin Laden was”determined the strike within the United States”.  When Bin Laden did, in fact, strike the United States, Cheney and the rest of the Bush administration responded by invading Iraq, a country that had absolutely nothing to do with attacking the United States.  Cheney claimed that there was “no doubt” that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, and he insisted that there were ties between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda.  He was utterly wrong on both counts.  At best, the war on Iraq was based on incompetent mis-assessments.  At worst, it was based on outright lies.

There were promises that Bin Laden would be caught, “dead or alive”.  He was not.  As President Obama noted today, the Bush-Cheney administration racked up a grand total of 3 convictions of all the suspected terrorists held at Guantanamo.  They also left Obama two unfinished wars abroad–one of which, Iraq, was utterly unnecessary and served to distract the nation from actually going after real terrorists who had actually attacked us, while making the United States less safe, in the conclusion of a National Intelligence Estimate.  They made no serious effort to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian morass, succeeding only in undermining the idea that the United States could act as a neutral broker in a now non-existent peace process.  Finally, they left simmering dangers in Pakistan and North Korea, having failed to find ways to make progress toward minimizing the threats posed by either country (each of which, unlike Iraq, actually does possess weapons of mass destruction).

Cheney’s “credentials” as a warrior against terror consist solely of his willingness to violate federal law and international treaties in order to torture detainees–sometimes, it has been reported, in an effort to extract information about a non-existent link between Iraq and Al Qaeda.

That’s good enough for right wingers–Pat Buchanan said the supposedly duling speeches between Obama and Cheney today were like Mikhail Barshynikov v. boxer Jake LaMotta, with Cheney cast as the hard nosed fighter.

Talking tough about waterboarding people doesn’t qualify Cheney as an expert on national security.  He and Bush handed Obama a number of incredible messes, as Obama alluded to today.  When Cheney claims that Obama is making the country less safe, it is reasonable to ask whether Cheney is merely trying to pre-emptively shift the blame for an attack, should one occur (and I certainly hope it does not).  It’s time for the traditional media to stop being cowed by Cheney’s tough guy bluster and start asking questions about the multiple national security failures and errors that took place on his watch.

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