Dick Cheney lays the smack to Obama on Iraq, U.S. global leadership

There is a school of thought, even within some supposedly conservative circles, that Dick Cheney represents an ill-advised way of thinking about the U.S. role in the world, and that conservatives should flee from any association with him if we want to be successful going forward.

No such thinking prevails here. We love Dick Cheney, and just because the nation lost its patience and its nerve as the War on Terror went on doesn't mean it or those who led it were wrong. And Cheney has never been more clear or on-point than we see in a Wall Street Journal op-ed this morning, co-written with his daughter Liz, about how Obama's weakness and muddled thinking have squandered not only our gains in Iraq but our essential ability to exercise global leadership. Pow:

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Rarely has a U.S. president been so wrong about so much at the expense of so many. Too many times to count, Mr. Obama has told us he is "ending" the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan—as though wishing made it so. His rhetoric has now come crashing into reality. Watching the black-clad ISIS jihadists take territory once secured by American blood is final proof, if any were needed, that America's enemies are not "decimated." They are emboldened and on the march. The fall of the Iraqi cities of Fallujah, Tikrit, Mosul and Tel Afar, and the establishment of terrorist safe havens across a large swath of the Arab world, present a strategic threat to the security of the United States. Mr. Obama's actions—before and after ISIS's recent advances in Iraq—have the effect of increasing that threat. On a trip to the Middle East this spring, we heard a constant refrain in capitals from the Persian Gulf to Israel, "Can you please explain what your president is doing?" "Why is he walking away?" "Why is he so blithely sacrificing the hard fought gains you secured in Iraq?" "Why is he abandoning your friends?" "Why is he doing deals with your enemies?" In one Arab capital, a senior official pulled out a map of Syria and Iraq. Drawing an arc with his finger from Raqqa province in northern Syria to Anbar province in western Iraq, he said, "They will control this territory. Al Qaeda is building safe havens and training camps here. Don't the Americans care?" Our president doesn't seem to. Iraq is at risk of falling to a radical Islamic terror group and Mr. Obama is talking climate change. Terrorists take control of more territory and resources than ever before in history, and he goes golfing. He seems blithely unaware, or indifferent to the fact, that a resurgent al Qaeda presents a clear and present danger to the United States of America. When Mr. Obama and his team came into office in 2009, al Qaeda in Iraq had been largely defeated, thanks primarily to the heroic efforts of U.S. armed forces during the surge. Mr. Obama had only to negotiate an agreement to leave behind some residual American forces, training and intelligence capabilities to help secure the peace. Instead, he abandoned Iraq and we are watching American defeat snatched from the jaws of victory.

The Cheneys also take Obama to task for his broader, systematic abandonment of America's position as global leader:

In the face of this threat, Mr. Obama is busy ushering America's adversaries into positions of power in the Middle East. First it was the Russians in Syria. Now, in a move that defies credulity, he toys with the idea of ushering Iran into Iraq. Only a fool would believe American policy in Iraq should be ceded to Iran, the world's largest state sponsor of terror. This president is willfully blind to the impact of his policies. Despite the threat to America unfolding across the Middle East, aided by his abandonment of Iraq, he has announced he intends to follow the same policy in Afghanistan. Despite clear evidence of the dire need for American leadership around the world, the desperation of our allies and the glee of our enemies, President Obama seems determined to leave office ensuring he has taken America down a notch. Indeed, the speed of the terrorists' takeover of territory in Iraq has been matched only by the speed of American decline on his watch.

Now I realize a lot of people are invested in the narrative that Dick Cheney is some sort of monster who led us into a misadventure based on lies, etc. That's becaues a lot of people are gullible and easily led by media narratives. This will not be popular with those of you of the libertarian stripe (then again, not much that I say ever is), but the Bush/Cheney approach to world leadership post-9/11 was absolutely correct. And it would still be the correct approach today if we had any leaders with the wisdom or courage to employ it. What Bush and Cheney realized - and to be fair, I don't think Bush realized it before 9/11, although Cheney probably did - was that it was delusional for America to think it could protect its security and its global interests with mealy-mouthed diplomacy and fanciful notions of internationalism. We had just gone through a decade of letting Saddam Hussein toy with us, kicking out weapon inspectors and thumbing his nose at No Fly Zone restrictions. Meanwhile, we had watched Yasser Arafat walk away from peace negotiations in 2000 and re-ignite an intifada that proved deadly to many individual Israelis and absolutely devastating to western hopes of peace in the region. And finally, Al Qaeda brought it home by murdering nearly 3,000 Americans, taking down the World Trade Center and damaging the Pentagon. We could not longer just lob cruise missiles and say we had offered a "proportionate" response, and we could no longer allow tinhorn dictators like Hussein to spit in our faces. No one said it would be easy. Donald Rumsfeld said it would be a "long hard slog." But we were dealing with people who were determined to hurt us, and now we no longer had the luxury of thinking they would never come to our shores. They would. They had. They would surely try to do it again. We could go to the UN for a resolution of condemnation, but what would that do? Nothing. We had to lead the world in standing up to this evil, and that didn't just mean "taking stands" with our words. It meant finding them where they were and killing them. Or it would happen again. And we couldn't just wait to be hit, and then act strictly in a retaliatory manner, as if we needed a permission slip from our antagonists to take action in our own best interests. We knew they were plotting against us. We needed to get them before they got us. Post-9/11, America understood this. It was clear that the old mentality had not been able to protect us and we needed a clearer, more sober view of how to stop terror across the globe. Iraq was part of this, not because they had WMDs but because Saddam had threatened both our economic and security interests already, and because he was wantonly violating the terms of the Gulf War Cease Fire in multiple ways. We were correct to invade in 2003. The clear-headed atmosphere of the post-9/11 world required that even Democrats like John Kerry and Hillary Clinton support the effort. The Iraq War was certainly not quick and easy, and that created the political environment that allowed Democrats and the media to turn against the whole effort, and worst of all, created the political environment that gave rise to Barack Obama. But after Bush ordered the surge in 2007, the war turned in our favor, and by the time Obama took office, Iraq was peaceful and was finding the way to political stability. It still would have required some work to secure its future, but Iraq could have been a democratic ally, a friendly source of oil and an example of freedom and liberty to the rest of the region. If this is now lost, it will be for exactly the reasons the Cheneys laid out in this op-ed. Because Obama didn't give a rip, and abandoned a nation America had invested a lot in. Obama sees everything in political terms, so to him it wasn't America's commitment, it was Bush's. He sees himself as the anti-Bush, so all he wanted to do was get out. And as the Cheneys demonstrate so well here, getting out is all Obama seems to want to do with respect to global leadership in general. He doesn't think America should be a world leader and he doesn't want us to be. He imagines that this will cause no problems because he can't tell the difference between his own vain imaginations and the world as it really is. Unfortunately, the terrorists can. Maybe now the 52 percent of the American electorate that left its brains at home before going to vote in the last two presidential elections will finally be reminded of what we learned on 9/11, and of why we need to maintain our patience and our nerve when the slog gets as long and hard as we were told it would. Gosh, I wish Bush and Cheney were still in charge today.