Cheney's War

Richard Cheney's speech to the Veterans of Foreign Wars wasn't only about promoting the warfare state. Cheney was also careful to note how warm he is to the welfare state: "the president has asked Congress for an 8 percent increase for veterans' health care and a 7 percent increase for veterans' programs overall." [Loud applause.]

With the audience warmed up with your money, Cheney got on to the business at hand, which is killing. If you don't want war with Iraq, says the vice president, you are engaging in "wishful thinking or willful blindness."

Actually, there is a third option: some people don't like unrelenting war mongering that seeks the wholesale demolition of Iraq, a once-liberal, once-wealthy country that has been painfully impoverished in eleven years of US bombings and sanctions, a war which will only incite more anger in the Moslem world, inspire more terror attacks, and provide an excuse for a further expansion of the police state at home.

Cheney said that Iraq and its government have to go because there is evidence those folks don't like us. Well, you know, that kind of thing happens when your stated goal is the annihilation of somebody else’s country. People who live there, and in particular the government in charge, can become agitated.

What about the newest claims that Iraq will have nuclear weapons "very soon"? Well, it is hard to know what to make of them because such claims are, by now, so inevitable. Is there any country, no matter how poor, any group, no matter how disorganized and low tech, that the US would not claim is developing nuclear weapons should the US decide to attack it?

The Bush administration is capable of making false claims about anything, and no one doubts it. In fact, should it become public that the US has made up this nuclear weapons thing out of whole cloth, it can count on the neoconservative pundits to defend the right of the government to lie.