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Why the fuck is Dick Cheney being allowed to talk about Iraq? Why is this POS in news

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Kadayi

Banned
How is there not a single person from the Bush administration behind bars for the fuckery they have committed? People are put in prison for tax evasions and marijuana use, and here these assholes can carry on without a single fuck given?

History will judge them, as well as those who let them get away with it.
 
I actually think Cheney believes he was doing right by America. His perspective is beyond warped though. All I ever needed to know about this guy showed itself in the 80's when voted against the Comprehensive Anti-Apartheid Act.
 

SRG01

Member
Let us also not forget that he was shooting at our planes that were enforcing the no fly zone still in effect since the first gulf war every single day.

And I believe the British intelligence came to the same conclusion regarding the WMD threats, Cheney and Bush were not in a vacuum when it came to making the decision. Hindsight is 20/20 but I remember hearing from commanders on the ground during and after the war that Iraq was just all kinds of fucked from an intel perspective because everyone was deceiving everyone else within Iraq. They had mention that Iraq was filled with world class liars because people within the Saddam regime wanted to maintain that they had the power and capability. Now that was to their detriment because the US and British intelligence believed them.

OMG, doesn't anyone remember Hans Blix?! His reports were in direct opposition to what US/British intelligence were saying at the time.
 

APF

Member
So do you mean that if intelligence stated that Saddam had WMDs or whatever else, we should have just left him alone with them? Since we didn't have intelligence that he would sell them to terrorists, then there was no justification to oust him from power?

It would be justification to intensify our current-at-the-time containment strategy.
 

joedan

Member
The strange thing is that when US politicians say "...but we must do something", they don't mean "We must try and solve the problem". They really mean "We need to bomb something"
 
McCain shouldn't be allowed anywhere near a discussion about foreign intervention either.

May I ask why, honest question?


“There is not a history of clashes that are violent between Sunnis and Shias, so I think they can probably get along.” - John McCain, 2003

“My belief is we will, in fact, be greeted as liberators. I think it will go relatively quickly, weeks rather than months.” - Dick Cheney, 2003


McCain and Cheney are equally wrong, which is to say that both have reached a height of ludicrous wrongness from which it is no longer possible to discern anything in reality.
 

Dead

well not really...yet
It's painful to read all the shit these fuckers said to justify their actions 10+ years ago. Any idiot with even a cursory amount of knowledge of the region could have told them exactly what was going to happen, yet these incompetent fucks just went on their merry way and still continue to regurgitate the same shit. Fucking makes me angry.
 

Nekofrog

Banned
it seems like lately conservatives have been coming out of the woodwork to tell everyone how wrong we were for going into iraq and how it was a huge mistake and we never should have done it but IT'S STILL BHO'S FAULT
 

Jimothy

Member
I actually think Cheney believes he was doing right by America. His perspective is beyond warped though. All I ever needed to know about this guy showed itself in the 80's when voted against the Comprehensive Anti-Apartheid Act.
The banality of evil yo.
 
How is there not a single person from the Bush administration behind bars for the fuckery they have committed? People are put in prison for tax evasions and marijuana use, and here these assholes can carry on without a single fuck given?

As is everything in life... If you want something done you have to do it yourself. Politicians don't give a fuck about justice.
 

APF

Member
Interesting, a quagmire means huge gains in the stock options Cheney has in Haliburton.
Cheney exercised a bunch of his options before he became VP, and had an arrangement for the the rest go to charity. I think most of the profits went to CV research or something along those lines.
 
Israel doesn't need terrorist training camp because their entire military is terrorist that uses banned weapons. Anyway that detail is moot, because the only reason given during 2003 was that Iraq is building nukes and we cant have that.

Holy shit.

Your viewpoint on the world is so F'ed its beyond comprehension.

You may want to read a little bit about Saddam Hussein and why putting a Nuclear weapon in his hands may be about the dumbest fuckin thing in the history of mankind.

May want to read up about the Halabja chemical attack, the Dujail Massacre, the Al-Anfal campaign in general hell. Read about how Saddam came to become the dictator of Iraq.

Saddam was a f'in maniac dude and you would be just fine with putting the most powerful weapons on earth into his hands.

We actually found a shitload of weapons in Iraq, chemical weapons and many other things. We just never found a nuclear weapon loaded into a warhead. The " smoking gun ". We basically found everything else we were looking for. All of them illegal under the pact that allowed Saddam to stay in power after the Gulf War in the first place. Hell the first time Saddam turned around a UN investigator he should of been outed, but of course, Clinton was in office at the time and there was no way we were going to attack anyone during that time period.

People with views of the world like your though, make me want to throw up.
 

GTI Guy

Member
Holy shit.

Your viewpoint on the world is so F'ed its beyond comprehension.

You may want to read a little bit about Saddam Hussein and why putting a Nuclear weapon in his hands may be about the dumbest fuckin thing in the history of mankind.

May want to read up about the Halabja chemical attack, the Dujail Massacre, the Al-Anfal campaign in general hell. Read about how Saddam came to become the dictator of Iraq.

Saddam was a f'in maniac dude and you would be just fine with putting the most powerful weapons on earth into his hands.

We actually found a shitload of weapons in Iraq, chemical weapons and many other things. We just never found a nuclear weapon loaded into a warhead. The " smoking gun ". We basically found everything else we were looking for. All of them illegal under the pact that allowed Saddam to stay in power after the Gulf War in the first place. Hell the first time Saddam turned around a UN investigator he should of been outed, but of course, Clinton was in office at the time and there was no way we were going to attack anyone during that time period.

People with views of the world like your though, make me want to throw up.

They found WMD after the invasion of Iraq?
 

Jonm1010

Banned
They found WMD after the invasion of Iraq?
No. They found remnants and bits and pieces of their program left over from a decade earlier. 90-95% of the program and materials were verified to have been missing, destroyed or in unusable condition. Many of what was found in that 5% was no longer usable. Nothing that even came close to constituting a threat or that they were on the verge of achieving it. Let alone going to give it to terrorists.

Despite claims to the contrary Saddam was not really pursuing much in the way of a nuclear program anymore. He was a paper tiger. He wanted his countrymen and enemies to think he had the weapons so he never told people he didn't(even though he didn't) and for the longest time he didn't want inspectors to find out he didn't because it would reduce his power in his mind if people knew what a poor state his dictatorship was in.

Yes they had chemical weapons but we knew that but even that was in a pretty bad state.

But ultimately none of that matters because the point that the apologist above you fails to mention is that prior to the invasion Saddam offered, without preconditions or any stipulations, to allow UN inspectors led by Hans Blix to have complete and uninterrupted access to anywhere they wanted to go in the country. Hans Blix begged the US on the UN floor to give him a couple more weeks to thoroughly investigate Saddams compounds and facilities and Bush basically said fuck that, I'm still gonna invade. Hans Blix and his team had to pull out and the rest is history, a bloody, disgusting and completely avoidable history.
 

Jonm1010

Banned
I know I'm walking into the Lions Den with meat strapped all over me, but I'm genuinely curious. When you have quotes such as this from prominent Democrats in 2002 "Iraq's search for weapons of mass destruction has proven impossible to deter and we should assume that it will continue for as long as Saddam is in power."...

Is it the opinion of you guys that Bush and Cheney were just evil masterminds that swindled Democrats? Was it bad intelligence, doctored intelligence?

Do me a favor and do some research into the "Office of Special Plans."

It really blows my mind how only a decade out so many people are so ignorant to one of the most important foreign policy events since Vietnam.

The Office of Special Plans was an intelligence wing created in 2002 headed by Paul Wolfowitz and Douglas Feith, two fundamentalist Neoconservatives within the Bush administration that literally manipulated intelligence to produce a false picture of Saddams WMD capabilities and ties to terrorists. They wanted to prove Saddams capabilities and ties to terrorism. So they started with the conclusion and worked backwards more or less. Claiming they were also putting a microscope under the other intelligence agencies to make sure they were operating properly but In reality were trying to force them onto the same page as them. Intelligence agencies like the CIA that ultimately were more correct in their assessment of Saddam.

Whether their methods were intentionally malicious or they were so convinced of their own thesis that it clouded their judgement we will probably never know. What is clear is they discarded information that didn't fit their narrative and only used info that did. They actively attacked and silenced other intelligence groups in the CIA and Pentagon that tried to argue that their wasn't a connection between Saddam and terrorists and Saddams capabilities weren't as strong as Wolfowitz was arguing. All of which ultimately served to paint a false reality that the bush administration then used to convince congress, the UN and the American people that Saddam was more powerful then he was and that he had terrorist ties. And frankly most researchers who have tackled the topic have come down on the side that Wolfowitz and company knew what they were doing, likely broke some laws or came close to it and many in the Bush administration knew as well.
 

LAUGHTREY

Modesty becomes a woman
I hope this backfires and everyone starts to question why we ever invaded Iraq in the first place, again.


I hope this shines the light on the people who lied and bent the truth to the breaking point, maybe some actual repercussions will be doled out.

I know it's sadly unlikely, but for some reason he decided to open his mouth about it, I don't see very many people saying he isn't full of shit.
 

Scrooged

Totally wronger about Nintendo's business decisions.
Well he's right that it was a mistake to completely pull out of Iraq. What we're seeing now is a direct consequence of that.

Whether we should have gone in in the first place is a separate issue at this point.
 

LAUGHTREY

Modesty becomes a woman
Well he's right that it was a mistake to completely pull out of Iraq. What we're seeing now is a direct consequence of that.

Whether we should have gone in in the first place is a separate issue at this point.

Prime Minister Maliki said the condition was to let Iraq punish US citizens and military in their own court of law if they break Iraqi law and we could stay.

We didn't agree to that, so we were asked to leave. No one would agree to Iraq prosecuting our soldiers.
 
Do you not remember the multiple teams of weapons inspectors that were running all over Iraq not really finding any WMDs and destroying what little they did find?

We had weapons inspectors in Iraq who said they couldn't find much of anything . . . and we kicked them out to start a war over the WMDs that they said they could not find . . . and did not exist.

Did you forget all of that?

This. Bush set an arbitrary deadline of March 23 (if I remember correctly), which didn't give enough time for Blix to complete what he was doing. The entire war was based on this ridiculous assumption that Iraq was playing Whack-a-mole with their weapons. Then you have Colin Powell going in front of the UN with photos of trains that supposedly had chemical weapons labs in them (they didn't) and other bullshit (a vial of anthrax or something?).

Maddening. The fact that he retcons history by saying that no one had any doubt is despicable.
 

Aaron

Member
I honestly thought at the time that the threat of going to war with Iraq was posturing. There seemed to be absolutely no reason to go ahead and do it. No evidence that Saddam was anything but a minor threat to small neighboring countries. Sure, he was doing terrible things to his own people, but the US has a long history of tolerating that sort of behavior.
 

Vibranium

Banned
History will judge them, as well as those who let them get away with it.

I personally believe that Bush and Cheney will be remembered as war criminals 100 years from now, but by then they'll be long dead and untouchable, just as they are now.
 

Longshot

Member
But more than that, Cheney doesn't appear to have any insight. It's like he doesn't see his own role in the crisis and is incapable of acknowledging his own errors. That's really scary to me.
I've always said that most politicians are egomaniacal fuckheads for years, and should be interviewed by psychiatrists regularly so we know where there mental state is, most other government jobs require this, but we don't do it to the people who run our countries.

Ridiculous.
 
Dick Cheney wants to send more boots to Iraq
"What I would do now," he said, "is, among other things, be realistic about the nature of the threat. When we're arguing over 300 advisers when the request had been for 20,000 in order to do the job right, I'm not sure we've really addressed the problem. I would definitely be helping the resistance up in Syria, in ISIS's back yard, with training and weapons and so forth, in order to be able to do a more effective job on that end of the party."
And this gem
"If we spend our time debating what happened 11 or 12 years ago, we're going to miss the threat that is growing and that we do face."
 

BSsBrolly

Banned
Cheney exercised a bunch of his options before he became VP, and had an arrangement for the the rest go to charity. I think most of the profits went to CV research or something along those lines.

Bullshit. I don't believe that at all. Do you have a link?
 

Stinkles

Clothed, sober, cooperative
Holy shit.

Your viewpoint on the world is so F'ed its beyond comprehension.

You may want to read a little bit about Saddam Hussein and why putting a Nuclear weapon in his hands may be about the dumbest fuckin thing in the history of mankind.

May want to read up about the Halabja chemical attack, the Dujail Massacre, the Al-Anfal campaign in general hell. Read about how Saddam came to become the dictator of Iraq.

Saddam was a f'in maniac dude and you would be just fine with putting the most powerful weapons on earth into his hands.

We actually found a shitload of weapons in Iraq, chemical weapons and many other things. We just never found a nuclear weapon loaded into a warhead. The " smoking gun ". We basically found everything else we were looking for. All of them illegal under the pact that allowed Saddam to stay in power after the Gulf War in the first place. Hell the first time Saddam turned around a UN investigator he should of been outed, but of course, Clinton was in office at the time and there was no way we were going to attack anyone during that time period.

People with views of the world like your though, make me want to throw up.


Can I ask you who you voted for last election?
 
Despite claims to the contrary Saddam was not really pursuing much in the way of a nuclear program anymore. He was a paper tiger. He wanted his countrymen and enemies to think he had the weapons so he never told people he didn't(even though he didn't) and for the longest time he didn't want inspectors to find out he didn't because it would reduce his power in his mind if people knew what a poor state his dictatorship was in.

This is one of the most important bits, in my mind.

Saddam was really stuck in between a rock and a hard place. Reveal that he had no credible WMDs and his position within his own state and within the region weakens. Reveal nothing and provoke the US.

I think that Saddam must have thought that the latter was the better option, thinking that the US would not act so belligerently and invade over his nonexistent weapons.
 
Cheney has been pushing "we can't waste time talking about what I said 11-12 years ago!" pretty hard.

Cheney doesn’t want to talk about ‘what happened 11 or 12 years ago’
“With all due respect, Jon, I was a strong supporter then of going into Iraq, I’m a strong supporter now. Everybody knows what my position is. There’s nothing to be argued about there.

“But if we spend our time debating what happened 11 or 12 years ago, we’re going to miss the threat that is growing and that we do face.”
The balls on this guy seriously.
In “Monty Python and the Holy Grail,” there’s a scene in which John Cleese’s Sir Lancelot, certain he’s doing the right thing in behalf of a damsel in distress, storms into a castle during a wedding party, indiscriminately slaughtering most of the guests with his sword. The castle owner, eager to curry favor with Lancelot, urges the survivors to let bygones be bygones.

“Let’s not bicker and argue about who killed whom,” he tells his few remaining guests.
 
Holy shit.

Your viewpoint on the world is so F'ed its beyond comprehension.

You may want to read a little bit about Saddam Hussein and why putting a Nuclear weapon in his hands may be about the dumbest fuckin thing in the history of mankind.

May want to read up about the Halabja chemical attack, the Dujail Massacre, the Al-Anfal campaign in general hell. Read about how Saddam came to become the dictator of Iraq.

Saddam was a f'in maniac dude and you would be just fine with putting the most powerful weapons on earth into his hands.

We actually found a shitload of weapons in Iraq, chemical weapons and many other things. We just never found a nuclear weapon loaded into a warhead. The " smoking gun ". We basically found everything else we were looking for. All of them illegal under the pact that allowed Saddam to stay in power after the Gulf War in the first place. Hell the first time Saddam turned around a UN investigator he should of been outed, but of course, Clinton was in office at the time and there was no way we were going to attack anyone during that time period.

People with views of the world like your though, make me want to throw up.

Holy shit.

Your viewpoint on the world is so F'ed its beyond comprehension.

You have very basic facts WRONG. There were no stockpiles of WMDs. All we found was a few little random remnants of WMDs that Saddam didn't even know about.

Halabja was indeed a disaster . . . BUT IT HAPPENED WHEN WE SUPPORTED SADDAM. Using that as excuse to invade makes as much sense as invading ourselves.
rumsfeld-saddam.jpg
 

FStop7

Banned
How is there not a single person from the Bush administration behind bars for the fuckery they have committed? People are put in prison for tax evasions and marijuana use, and here these assholes can carry on without a single fuck given?

Nobody goes to jail.

Nixon facilitated a burglary.

Reagan committed treason.

We won't even begin to talk about the 2008 financial crisis.
 

Stinkles

Clothed, sober, cooperative
Holy shit.

Your viewpoint on the world is so F'ed its beyond comprehension.

You have very basic facts WRONG. There were no stockpiles of WMDs. All we found was a few little random remnants of WMDs that Saddam didn't even know about.

Halabja was indeed a disaster . . . BUT IT HAPPENED WHEN WE SUPPORTED SADDAM. Using that as excuse to invade makes as much sense as invading ourselves.
rumsfeld-saddam.jpg

You're never going to see him in this thread again.
 

benjipwns

Banned
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qrD7N2JMaJc

When asked if the United States will “get through this decade without another massive attack on the homeland,” former vice president Dick Cheney replied that he thinks something even worse than the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks is coming.

“I doubt it,” Cheney said. “I think there will be another attack and the next time I think it’s likely to be far deadlier than the last one. You can just imagine what would happen if somebody could smuggle a nuclear device, put it in a shipping container, and drive it down the beltway outside Washington D.C.”

Hewitt wondered if the government could continue in such a scenario and Cheney recalled a Cold War era plan for constitutional government in the event of a nuclear attack.

“Basically, it involved having a government in waiting if you will ready to go in the event of nuclear attack on the United States so that we could always maintain the constitutional-based governmental authority,” he explained. “We operated and actually trained under circumstances of how would we go about providing for a government to survive if we were having nuclear weapons from the Soviet Union falling all over the country.”
 
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