When Dick Cheney endorsed Kamala Harris this past week, I blanched.
I understand the political appeal of Cheney’s endorsement. And I’m on board for whatever it takes to win this election. I am a single issue voter and that issue is my deep desire to not have Donald Trump involved in any aspect of my life.
But it’s still disheartening to watch people who want Trump held accountable cheer for Cheney because we let all of these folks off the hook.
Robert Draper tries to make the point that we were not “lied” into Iraq. Ok, no one at any point said “We don’t have the intel but darn it, I just wanna go in there and get Sadaam, consequences be damned.” But what Draper does do repeatedly is show how the intel on Iraq’s links to Al Qaeda, Bin Laden, etc. were flimsy at best and non-existent at worst.
Many talk about the Cheney shadow presidency under Bush but he actually gets little run here. The main characters are Donald Rumsfeld and the Pentagon people versus Condolezza Rice, Colin Powell and the ones at State, with the CIA often caught in between. Everyone was scared after 9/11, everyone flailing in the shadows for unseen enemies. And our country had the worst people in charge of it.
While Draper doesn’t lay it all at Bush’s feet, he also doesn’t buy the popular straw man that Bush was a simpleton duped by power mongers. Bush heard what he wanted to hear. He wanted intel that said Iraq was doing bad things. That intel was conjured out of thin air or based on conjecture over-and-over again. He made the decision.
There are days when I think the War in Iraq is worse than 1/6* and that GWB is a worse President than Trump. It’s not a discussion I’m interested in, mostly because it’s too depressing and probably doesn’t have a correct answer. But I wish we hadn’t memoryholed what we did to that country, that region. And I wish Harris had rejected that endorsement.
*Spencer Ackerman’s excellent Reign of Terror does the work of yoking 9/11 to 1/6 and it’s worth your time.
