Think Progress points out that Cheney is still lying about a connection between Iraq and al Qaeda, this time to high school juniors at the Wyoming Boys State Conference.
When asked if we could win the war in Iraq he said yes and then went on to describe that Iraq is a central point in the war on terror and then gave a history of pre- and post-9/11. He talked about al Qaeda in Afghanistan in the late 90s. Then post 9/11 he said "we were going to use our intelligence services and our military forces and our economic power and means to go after those who sponsored terror, that provided safe haven for terror -- and so forth. Went into Afghanistan, cleaned that out, and obviously are in Iraq now." Quite a leap isn't that?
Cheney is also a fan of the bait and switch. See how he supports a war in Iraq with the non sequitor of saying terrorists train in Afghanistran: "There is an argument being made by some of my friends on the other side of the aisle that say, well, Afghanistan is a good war, we want to fight that one, but Iraq is a bad war, we don't want to do that. And they act as though somehow you can walk away from Iraq without consequence. You can't. The fact is national boundaries out there don't mean that much when you're talking about a global war on terror. And when you take people and train them in Afghanistan, or anyplace -- a lot of other places out there have got training, too -- and then they take off and go partway around the world -- we've seen attacks by those folks in Afghanistan, originally trained there, not only in New York and Washington, but London, Madrid, in Istanbul, in Algiers, in Morocco, in Tunisia, in Mombasa, in East Africa, in Jakarta, in Bali -- all over the world."
RIght, "national boundaries out there don't mean much". Invade whatever country you want. I guess this is why they don't seem to care about world opinion of our actions. But what Think Progress reported on was this gem:
"The worst terrorist we had in Iraq was a guy named Abu Musab al Zarqawi, a Jordanian by birth; served time in a Jordanian prison as a terrorist, was let out on amnesty. Then he went to Afghanistan and ran one of those training camps back in the late '90s that trained terrorists. Then when we launched into Afghanistan after 9/11, he was wounded, and fled to Baghdad for medical treatment, and then set up shop in Iraq. So he operated in Jordan, he operated in Afghanistan, then he moved to Iraq. He was the lead al Qaida terrorist in Iraq until we killed him last June, just about a year ago. He's the guy who was responsible for blowing up the mosque at Samarra that really precipitated the conflict between the Shia and the Sunni."
Notice how he describes the geographical connections but not much else. Did we go to war in Iraq because he "set up shop" there? No of course not, it wasn't even a consideration. We went to war to overthrow Saddam Hussein. This probably helped Zarqawi because as the Senate Intelligence Committee Report concluded, Saddam and Al Qaeda were enemies, not collaborators.
I found some of his other lies annoying too. "And I think we're making significant progress now in terms of what's happening in Anbar Province. It's out west of Baghdad. We've seen a turn out there that the local population has turned on al Qaida, that the tribal sheikhs have gotten their people actively involved in opposing the al Qaida elements out there that are responsible for the foreign bombers who come in and do a lot of the suicide bombings."
Notice how he just mentions the foreign bombers and the suicide bombings. No mention of the fact that foreigners are a tiny portion of the insurgency or the other ways they attack like using IEDs. The wikipedia article on the Iraqi Insurgency has a good break down of who we're fighting.
I found this ironic, the article says "Zarqawi's group has since announced the formation of the Ansar platoon, a squad of Iraqi suicide bombers, which an AP writer called 'an apparent bid to deflect criticism that most suicide bombers in Iraq are foreigners.'" though the source article link is dead.
I guess Cheney's view is if we concentrate on the 1% case the other 99% will work itself out. Or it could merely be that we need to attack al Qaeda wherever they are and who cares about the mess we leave.
The bulk of Cheney's speech was about how public service can be rewarding, at any level of government. I was surprised to see him say "Running for my current job as Vice President in 2000 was a notion that came out of the blue, and, obviously, it was somebody else's idea. I was not a volunteer." That's pretty blunt. And I have no idea what he meant when describing Wyoming as "a two-party state, but not heavily partisan". They are one of the most staunchly Republican states in the US. I guess if you don't have dissent your not partisan. Saddam's Iraq wasn't partisan either.
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