What the hell does this mean? Is he just trying to scare the sheep again, or is our esteemed Veep really pathologically obsessed with an imagined connection between 9/11 and Saddam?
“Some in our own country claim retreat from Iraq would satisfy the appetite of the terrorists and get them to leave us alone”
Dick, Dick, Dick, why must you continue to confuse a civil war between rival Muslim sects in Iraq with The War Against Terrorism[sup]TM[/sup]? Unless you are doing it on purpose… Nah, how could one of our leaders be so evil as to contrive to mislead frightened voters into supporting the occupation of a country in the middle of a civil war? Could he?
It looks like he addressing the now-popular (in America) belief that our military presence and general bungling of the Iraq situation has made us less safe from terror attacks in America. I think the only way he can do this without pointing out that he is largely responsible for the Iraq SNAFU is to point backwards to nine-eleven.
Here’s the quote that gets me, though:
“Some in our own country claim retreat from Iraq would satisfy the appetite of the terrorists and get them to leave us alone.”
Huh? Who in our country is claiming that? If there is anyone saying that, they are as deluded as the people claiming that staying the course in Iraq will keep the terrorists from following us home. Unfortunately, the latter claim is one that was stated by the President himself.
I’m sure we’ll be hearing that the Democrats are the “cut-and-run” and “appeasement” party many, many times over the next ten weeks.
So:
(1) The US wasn’t in Iraq.
(2) The terrorists didn’t actually come from Iraq.
(3) Iraq didn’t have WMDs.
(4) Life for the average Iraqi has not improved after the invasion.
(5) Iraq doesn’t seem much closer to being a demnocratic state.
No, just the opposite. Cheney is saying that the attack on 9/11 did not occur because we were in Iraq.
What it means is that the reason terrorists hate us is not because we invaded Iraq. That hatred existed before we invaded Iraq, and that is what caused 9/11.
It is implied in your first paragraph. You mentioned the general belief that the invasion of Iraq made the terrorists mad at the US, and thus makes us less safe from terror attacks. (Obviously, you can’t cite that this is true, anymore than I could that the invasion of Iraq made terror attacks on the US less likely).
9/11 demonstrates that terrorists in general, not limited to those in Iraq, as Cheney makes clear, hated us enough to attack us and kill thousands.
Which demonstrates the problem I have with the repeated ranting about how the Bush administration keeps saying that Saddam was involved in 9/11. Here we have an example where Cheney states explicitly that Iraq was not involved in 9/11. And yet it is (mis)interpreted to say exactly the opposite.
:shrugs:
I leave you all to five or six pages of repeating the mantra to each other in hopes of making it true -
This absurd line of ‘reasoning’ is based on a recurring fallacy. Because it comes up so often, let me do the honors of naming it.
By the powers invested in me as President of Freedonia :D, I hereby decree it to be the “Lump of Terrorists” fallacy.
That is to say, it’s the fallacy that there are a certain fixed number of terrorists in the world, in the same manner that the Lump of Labor fallacy purportedly assumes that there’s a fixed amount of work in the world that needs to be done.
Unfortunately (given the way the Bush Administration approaches the world), this is in fact a fallacy. The 9/11 terrorists were of course mad at us before Iraq, but needless to say, a whole bunch of people who had no beef with us five years ago, do now on account of what we have done in Iraq.
Rumsfeld, in one of his lucid moments a few years back, wondered aloud if we were creating new terrorists faster than we were killing terrorists already in existence. Of course we are, and as long as we’re occupying Iraq and making a total hash of it, that will continue to be the case.
Leaving Iraq should reduce the rate at which we create more terrorists: if we leave Iraq in 2007, few will become terrorists in 2009 on account of our receding involvement in Iraq.
If there were a fixed number of terrorists in the world, then the question of whether leaving Iraq would satisfy them would be germane. But since our presence and actions in Iraq are turning people into terrorists, it’s a pretty stupid question.
If that helps you forget about the tens of thousands of Iraqi civilians killed since the statue fell, then I guess you need to repeat this mantra frequently.
But it’s not ClintonGotABlowJob, but ClintonGotABlowJobAndLiedAboutItUnderOath. So it’s basically BushLied (about pretty well everything) vs. ClintonLied (about a blow job).
No, that’s not what he’s saying, and no one is saying that “the terrorists” will leave us alone if we exit Iraq (at least no one of consequence). What people are mostly saying is “the terrorsts” hated before we went to Iraq and they hate us even more since then. Many of us thought going into Iraq would create a bigger terrorist threat than not going into Iraq. We were right.
I’ve seen some people claim that Bush said Saddam ordered the 9/11 attack. While that is a gross exageration of what the administration has said, they certainly overplayed the link between SH and al Qaeda. Whatever links there might have been were small and tenuous. Even if you think al Qaeda had some presense in Iraq in 2002, can we agree that their presense there increased signficnatly once we invaded?
Right. But if we had a decent Ministry of Truth, it would stop senior Party members like Comrade Cheney from saying silly things like “We were not in Iraq on September 11, 2001.” That only creates work for the people who have to correct the archives to something more truthful like “We were spreading peace and democracy among the terrorist-loving people in Iraq.” And that double-plus-ungood in anyone’s language.
Cheney is trying to prove that his fuckup in Iraq doesn’t have any consequences. I think any soldier or civilian dodging bullets in Iraq could tell you that that’s wrong. The claim that Iraq hasn’t provided a cause celebre for terrorist recruiters is kinda nuts.
Not quite: he wants you to believe that it has only good consequences, such as bringing democracy to Iraq and securing the US’s supply of oil. Any bad cosequences are either irrelevant, or would have happened anyway.
As I mentioned earlier, this is an unprovable opinion. The only available evidence is number of successful terrorist attacks before the invasion (one) vs. the number of successful terrorist attacks since the invasion (zero). And I can’t prove that the reduction in successful terrorist attacks is the result of the invasion of Iraq, any more than you can prove that the risk of terrorist attacks has gone up as the result of the invasion.
Sure. But that implies that the invasion of Iraq tended to draw al-Queda into Iraq, where they can be successfully fought. This is what Bush meant by saying that we could fight them (the terrorists) over there, or over here (meaning in the US).
Didn’t al-Zarqawi have a letter when he was killed, bemoaning that the invasion of Iraq and subsequent had had a devastating effect on al-Queda? And this downgrade in the morale and thus capabilities of al-Queda would tend to argue that the invasion of Iraq has not increased the terrorist threat.
Well, actually, yes, it does say this.
And the problem is that your first sentence makes it clear that you know that Cheney is disavowing a connection between 9/11 and Iraq, and yet your second sentence claims that he is linking them.