Jonathan Chait evidently also noticed former Vice President Cheney’s bizarre demand over the weekend that, in the wake of the Al-Awlaki killing, President Obama apologize for ever implying Cheney was wrong. Here’s what Cheney said:
They’ve agreed they need to be tough and aggressive in defending the nation and using some of the same techniques that the Bush administration did.
Chait tries to figure out just why it is Cheney sees the drone strike as vindication. He thinks it has to do with the neocon’s rigidly bipolar worldview, through which—in one of the many signs of the movements Marxist roots—all questions are reduced to an immovable dichotomy:
[According to neoconservative thinking] [k]illing terrorists is okay, but it’s a distraction. This is a war, and you fight wars by deploying armies in the field against states. That is the belief that drove the Bush administration to deem war against Iraq an essential part of the war on terror. […]
That was the nub of Bush’s worldview. The war on terror was a war, something fought with massed military power. If you were criticizing Bush’s approach from the left, you were in favor of weakness and surrender. If you criticized it from the right, you were in favor of a new land invasion. The neoconservatives genuinely seemed to believe that the strategic options lay along a linear scale, from soft to tough. By this way of thinking, Obama was accusing them of acting too tough.
And so, since he has killed a great many terrorists, Obama is now “tough,” and has therefore adopted the Bush–Cheney approach. Cheney’s bizarre misapprehension about the current administration simply reflects his failure to even conceive of the possibility that the fight against Al Qaeda might be waged, not just less, but better.
This is probably true to some degree, but I don’t think it explains what Cheney was really getting at. If you look back on the CNN exchange, this is how Cheney framed his previously controversial—now supposedly vindicated—actions:
“The thing I’m waiting for is for the administration to go back and correct something they said two years ago when they criticized us for ‘overreacting’ to the events of 9/11,” said Cheney. “They, in effect, said that we had walked away from our ideals, or taken policies contrary to our ideals when we had enhanced interrogation techniques.”
“Now they clearly had moved in the direction of taking robust action when they feel it is justified. I say in this case I think it was, but I think they need to go back and reconsider what the president said when he was in Cairo,” he added.
While he talks about toughness and takes credit for initiating the drone strike program, you’ll note that Cheney’s whinge rotates around Obama’s description of what the former VP calls “enhanced interrogation”—and what the rest of the free-thinking world has long considered torture:
He said in his Cairo speech that he had — quote — banned torture. Well, we were never torturing anybody in the first place.
Keeping in mind that Cheney is focused on defending his decision to become a war criminal (and obsessive focus of his ever since he’s reentered the spotlight; it’s all about the legacy by this point, after all) what I think Cheney’s really upset about is the President’s unwillingness to credit his predecessors for their willingness to bend the law well past the breakage-point. Cheney, remember, is a man who thought the lesson of Watergate wasn’t about the dangers of an unrestrained Executive; he thought the lesson was the importance of shielding the President from Congressional inquiry. He’s a real believer in the idea of the strong, noble Great Leader doing whatever is necessary—even if it means breaking the weak and foolish laws of a democracy—to save the West from itself.
Knowing that many people are a little uncomfortable with the Constitutionality of the President’s having an American citizen killed, Cheney is demanding that Obama admit the truth—that sometimes in order to save the Constitution, you’ve gotta shred it.
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