Rosen has a quote that summarizes the feeling of the American
left who continuously attack Dick Cheney. The author wrote,
Cheney’s “gated driveway has seen more than its
share of protestors, chanting about ‘torture’
and spray-paining the asphalt… Cheney remains, in many
minds, the malevolent power behind the throne-witness President
Obama’s joke about Cheney’s being the worst president
of his lifetime. (Yet) to many conservatives, however, Dick
Cheney was, and remains, a bona fide hero, perhaps America’s
staunchest, most unapologetic defender of a muscular foreign
policy abroad and fiscal restraint at home.”
He explained, “My chief aim was to rescue this man
from the characterization of Darth Vader. We need to remember
he is a flesh and blood human being. I found him to be a deep
analytical thinker. Since mostly ‘Easterners’
write about him they do not grasp Cheney’s Western background
that taught him to speak with an economy of words. The Eastern
ear might see this as withholding, illusive, or menacing.”
But Cheney is anything but menacing. It becomes evident after
reading this book that the former Vice-President is a straight
talker, giving substantial answers to very probing questions,
including the controversy over the Iraq War. Readers are reminded
by Cheney that in December 1998 then President Bill Clinton
said, “If Saddam defies the world and we fail to respond,
we will face a far greater threat in the future. Mark my words,
he will develop weapons of mass destruction, he will deploy
them and he will use them.” There was bipartisan support
for the American air and missile strikes on suspected Iraqi
sites.
When asked about the dichotomy between the Democrat’s
support then and their attitude during the Bush-Cheney administration
Rosen stated, “Cheney always rejected the idea that
he and the President sat around and said ‘let’s
just do Iraq.’ Under President Clinton the policy of
the US was to effectuate regime change in Iraq. When it became
the idea of the Republican administration the Democrats effectively
piled on and sounded a different tune.”
Another event that relates to today’s issues is the
Israeli attack on the Syrian nuclear power plant. Cheney discusses
in depth his perspective of what happened. Rosen writes how
Cheney questioned on more than one occasion why a North Korean
nuclear official was traveling regularly to Damascus. He became
skeptical, but after seeing the photographs taken by Israeli
intelligence he pushed for US air strikes to destroy the Syrian
reactor, the al-Kibar complex. Rosen quotes Cheney, “I
was the only one who was advocating this course of action.
And that’s when they (the Bush administration) opted
to go to the United Nations… I was confident there was
no way the Israelis were going to turn the matter over to
the United Nations.”
As Michael Bar-Zohar
in his recently released book, No Mission Is Impossible,
points out the IAF photographed the reactor, Mossad filmed
a video inside the reactor, and Israeli commandos collected
radioactive soil samples from the reactor for proof. But the
Bush Administration refused to act proactively, forcing Israel
to go it alone and destroy the reactor. In hindsight Cheney
was correct and everyone else in the Bush Administration was
wrong. He told Rosen, “I thought it was badly handled,
still do today…We made a mistake as an administration
when we didn’t take it out.”
