A few months after Barack Obama was sworn in as president,
Dick Cheney sat down with Sean Hannity for — I couldn’t call it an “interview,” more of an exchange of talking points — in which he lambasted the new president for coddling terrorists...Following the killing of Anwar Awlaki, the administration’s latest success in a stepped-up campaign of targeting Al Qaeda, Cheney is back in the news again. Unsurprisingly, Cheney is not offering any apologies. Instead
he’s demanding that Obama give one — to him.
How does this event vindicate Cheney? By his logic, the administration’s policy of striking Al Qaeda proves that George W. Bush and (especially) Cheney were right all along. “They’ve agreed,” argues Cheney in a
CNN interview, “they need to be tough and aggressive in defending the nation and using some of the same techniques that the Bush administration did.” So Cheney was right!
This bizarre conclusion is interesting not only as a window into Cheney’s hermetically sealed mind, in which it is always dark and cold and
the television is always tuned to Fox News, but as an expression of a larger neoconservative fallacy. After the 9/11 attacks, neoconservatives concluded that the proper response was a conventional war. Columnist Charles Krauthammer, in a
column written a few weeks after the attacks, summed up the right’s mentality:
Yes, we need to get Osama bin Laden. Yes, we need to bring down the terrorist networks. But the overriding aim of the war on terrorism is changing regimes. And it starts with the Taliban. Searching Afghan caves for bin Laden is precisely the trap he would wish us to fall into. Terrorists cannot operate without the succor and protection of governments. The planet is divided into countries. Unless terrorists want to camp in Antarctica, they must live in sovereign states. The objective of this war must be to make it impossible or intolerable for any state to harbor, protect or aid and abet terrorists. The point is not to swat every mosquito, but to drain the swamp.
That sentiment informed the Bush administration’s policies. Killing terrorists is okay, but it’s a distraction. This is a war, and you fight wars by deploying armies in the field against states. That is the belief that drove the Bush administration to deem war against Iraq an essential part of the war on terror.
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I’d only add that there’s an even simpler fallacy on display here. Cheney is claiming vindication in the fact that Obama is doing what it takes to wage a successful war on terror, even though he has done this
while expressly repudiating one of the central elements of Bush’s approach to terrorism: Torture.
After all, in the
Cairo speech that Cheney cites, the one in which Obama said we had walked away from our ideals, Obama
specifically cited torture as the chief example of this.
Now, Cheney is well aware of this. That’s why, in his CNN interview, he also offered this tricky sleight of hand: “He said in his Cairo speech that he had — quote — banned torture. Well we were never torturing anybody in the first place.”
Get the trick? In order for Cheney’s claim of vindication to have any logical consistency whatsoever, he needs to deny that the Bush adminstration ever engaged in the very practice that Obama subsequently banned. But, of course, whether you call it torture or not, the Bush administration did engage in enhanced interrogation techniques that Obama subsequently ended by executive order — without it damaging the pursuit of al Qaeda in the least.
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