During an interview with CNN last week, Dick Cheney was absolutely clear that he had no regrets about the invasion of Iraq, and that he doesn’t believe any apologies are owed to anyone.
Here’s what we know today – We know that before the attacks of 9/11, Dick Cheney was meeting secretly with members of the energy industry where they took a map of Iraq and divided the country into different segments, one for each member of the oil industry. We know that the intelligence used to convince Congress and the public to support the war was manipulated to falsely claim that Saddam Hussein was building weapons of mass destruction. We know that the Cheney administration authorized and encouraged the torture of detainees. We know that the policies of Cheney and Bush helped to increase and embolden the ranks of Al Qaeda and ISIS. And we know that close to 5,000 U.S. troops have lost their lives fighting in Iraq alone.
Those are just a few of the things that Dick Cheney could apologize for, but instead, he insists that he has no apologies to make.
The timing of the release of his new book is not a coincidence. Cheney knows that Obama has been very strong on foreign policy, which gives the Democratic Party the upper hand heading into an election year. Cheney is hoping to re-write history so that his party won’t have to keep answering tough questions about the Iraq invasion, because as we’ve seen from the candidates so far, the GOP presidential candidates have failed miserably when they are asked about the Iraq invasion.
But Americans aren’t stupid, and they aren’t going to buy into Cheney’s false narrative about the invasion of Iraq.
