Dick Cheney: The (mad) deal with Iran

[Valin]

Power Line:

Scott Johnson

September 9, 2015

 

Vice President Cheney spoke at the American Enterprise Institute on the Iran deal yesterday. AEI has posted the video along with a brief summary here; I have posted the video below. The speech is about 35 minutes long followed by 10 minutes of questions and answers.

 

Cheney’s speech provides a compelling critique of the deal tying together numerous threads against it, several drawn from previous statements made by President Obama himself and from Secretary Kerry. Arming and funding Iran “is not an act of peace, is not — as the president claims — the only alternative to war. It is madness,” he argues.

 

 

(Snip)

[Valin]

Dick Cheney Was For the Iran Deal Before He Was Against It

The former veep's bloviating at the American Enterprise Institute today was hypocritical baloney.

J. Dana Stuster
September 8, 2015

 

Like a Ghost of September 11ths Future, former Vice President Richard Cheney returned to the American Enterprise Institute on Tuesday to once again warn against what he sees as the bleak consequences of our post-neoconservative moment. Almost exactly one year ago, he was in the same place, bemoaning that the United States “must deal with threats before they become grave dangers and dangers before they become catastrophes,” while eliding his own role in fomenting many of the threats to which he referred. This year, he was back to expand on one of those catastrophes, at least from his perspective: the consequences of the Iran nuclear agreement.

 

Cheney’s opposition to the agreement will be remembered as one of his least consequential foreign policy mistakes — if it is remembered at all. Washington has a short memory, and perhaps that’s what’s most striking about Cheney’s stance on the Iran deal: the clear record that demonstrates that he likely would have supported the deal had it been negotiated a decade ago, and that he would have opposed critics’ tactics to scuttle the agreement on principle, had it been reached by his own administration. Even in Washington, hypocrisy is rarely so blatant as it has been in Cheney’s effort to put himself on the wrong side of the Iran nuclear agreement.

 

First, there are Cheney’s objections to the negotiations that led to the agreement. In his speech today, he rewrote the history of the Bush administration’s outreach to Iran. In 2006, then-Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said the United States was “making every effort to achieve a successful diplomatic outcome” to bring the international community together to negotiate a deal to ensure Iran did not build a nuclear weapon. But in recent weeks, Cheney has tried to distance himself from these facts, passing his administration’s diplomatic overtures off on European nations that he says were reacting to the Bush administration’s hawkish posturing on Iran. “It actually was with our European friends, primarily. They were eager to pursue some kind of discussions,” he told the Weekly Standard last week, even while admitting he conveniently didn’t remember the particulars. “I’d have to go back and check the record for specific details,” he said. Let’s make it easy: Secretary Rice’s statement and the international proposed framework are online.

 

(Snip)

 

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Dick Cheney bloviating? I don't recall Dick Cheney ever bloviate...but I could be worng.

[Valin]

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