Joe Conason's Opinion Piece On Dick Cheney's Creditability

The New York Observer - Op-ED

...Cheney cares nothing for those facts. As the official who most vehemently assured us of the certain existence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, he remains immune to the kind of embarrassment that would have required an honorable man to resign from office long ago.

During his latest foreign trip, he warned Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Representative Jack Murtha (D-Penn.) that the redeployment of U.S. troops from Iraq would “validate the Al Qaeda strategy,” as if Mr. bin Laden somehow lured the United States into invading Mesopotamia. Reiterating the point later, he added: “Al Qaeda functions on the basis that they think they can break our will. That’s their fundamental underlying strategy: that if they can kill enough Americans or cause enough havoc, create enough chaos in Iraq, then we’ll quit and go home.”

Actually, we now know that the occupation of Iraq—the Cheney strategy—has strengthened Al Qaeda immeasurably by recruiting thousands of young Muslims to its cause. We know that because the National Intelligence Estimate prepared for the Bush administration a year ago said so. According to The Washington Post, a newspaper whose editorial page supports the war, officials familiar with the classified document said the N.I.E. concluded that “rather than contributing to eventual victory in the global counterterrorism struggle, the situation in Iraq has worsened the U.S. position.”

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