One of my ongoing themes in recent years has been this:
After 9/11, Americans woke up from their slumber and briefly understood the real nature of terrorist threats, and shed their delusions about what is necessary and proper to do to protect ourselves. That's why we supported aggressive action abroad to kill and/or capture members of Al Qaeda and other major terrorist groups.
But over time, most Americans returned to their delusional 9/10 mindset and were no longer will to accept the things that were necessary to protect America against these threats. A few Americans never lost sight of reality, and two of these were George W. Bush and Dick Cheney.
One of the reasons they lost popularity in the latter years of their presidency is that they insisted on remaining serious about the fight against terrorism, while the general public was sick of it and just wanted to think about something else.
So when you put Cheney on camera and let someone like Chuck Todd go at him on the matter of "terror," what you hear is a guy who still understands what a lot of people forgot some eight to 10 years ago. Cheney doesn't concede a thing here, nor should he:
The best exchange is when Todd asks Cheney if the U.S. would prosecute ISIS for war crimes if they waterboarded an American. Cheney replies, "He's not likely to be waterboarded. He's likely to have his head cut off."
Amen. Seriously, is anyone dealing soberly with the real nature of the enemies we're up against? We're fighting people who think nothing of hijacking planes and crashing them into skycrapers, and cutting off the heads of civilians. Yet the Democrats ands the media insist on losing their lunch over the interrogation techniques we used?
The interview becomes a tiresome cycle of Todd quoting UN-type weasels stating their opinions and Cheney saying that the people being quoted and their opinions are a bunch of nonsense.
As Cheney points out, all this "torture" nonsense puts us in jeopardy internationally because anyone who signs on to work with us is likely to later be hung out to dry by politicians on Capitol Hill. One of the reasons our adversaries don't fear us right now on the international stage is because, whenever we take serious action to defend ourselves and our interests, domestic politicians go after our own people for their own purposes. Our enemies know that America doesn't really have the stomach for the fight, and it's usually our own politicians that lead the charge.
But not Dick Cheney. He doesn't concede a single point, a single time, because unlike most Americans, he hasn't lost sight of the real stakes or the real nature of the threat. We did what we needed to do to get information out of these creeps, and that's the nature of war, especially against an enemy that observes no international standards concerning the conduct of war. And Cheney's right. The people who did it should be regarded as heroes, not as suspects, and the latter is only happening because it's in some people's political interests to do so.
Good to see him. I wish he was still in the White House with Bush today.
