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Dick Cheney and other republicans throw stones at Obama from Glass House
The Hill reported that Mr. Cheney complained (once again) that the United States took its eye off the terror threat under Mr. Obama’s watch.
The Washington Examiner, meanwhile, quoted an unnamed source at the meeting as saying Mr. Cheney warned “how unprepared the U.S. military is for any kind of medium- or large-scale engagement against ISIS because the administration is cutting the military so much.” He also blamed the rise of ISIS on Mr. Obama’s “failed policies” in the Middle East.
Whatever Mr. Obama’s shortcomings may be, Mr. Cheney is an absurdly flawed critic on national security.
He was a primary architect of the Iraq war, propelling the United States into a bogus and costly conflict that may represent the most disastrous foreign policy blunder in recent memory. It was that war, in its early days, which gave rise to the militant group that would become ISIS.
Like President George W. Bush, Mr. Cheney has shown no willingness to acknowledge the impact of these ruinous policies. Instead, he’s tried to spin an irredeemable legacy.
It wasn’t just the content of Mr. Cheney’s admonitions but also the timing that was jarring. He chose to rally the G.O.P. troops on the eve of a major speech in which President Obama intends to lay out his strategy towards ISIS. It used to be that when an American President was confronting a national security threat, including with military action, Republicans and Democrats would at least listen to what he had to say before criticizing. Mr. Cheney chose to let loose pre-emptively.
And while he urged Republicans to adopt a more muscular military posture, he apparently did not lay out a specific plan for confronting and defeating ISIS. Of course not. That failure puts him in good company, with pretty much all the other Republican armchair hawks.
The disinguenous (at best) nature of Republican criticism was typified by an appearance this morning on the Senate floor by the Minority Leader, Mitch McConnell, who called Mr. Obama a “reluctant commander-in-chief’’ — as if the country wants or needs an eager one — and blathered on about what Mr. Obama needed to do in his speech.
Mr. McConnell presumably knows exactly what Mr. Obama plans to say, since the president had him and other Congressional leaders down to the White House on Tuesday to tell them just that.
Representative Jack Kingston, the Georgia Republican, offered a surprisingly honest, if amazingly cynical, assessment of the politics of the moment, saying that Republicans “like the path we’re on now.”
“We can denounce it if it goes bad, and praise it if it goes well and ask what took him so long,” Kingston told The New York Times.