The Cheney Doctrine -- War is Like Learning to Ride a Bicycle ... If You Fail, Just Get Back On and Do It Again . . . . .

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Good article in Salon by Andrew O'Hehir about the destructive legacy that Dick Cheney has unceremoniously dropped at the feet of the American people with his great Iraq Adventure.

The key excerpt, and the most vital point to be taken away from O'Hehir's observation is this:

If we don’t quite know how the Iraq endgame will play out, it’s not pretty. The prospect of helicopters lifting embassy personnel off the roof, Saigon-style, does not seem terribly far away. Last week Obama announced that he would order military advisers into the country to pep up the Iraqi army, which seems to be collapsing before the Sunni insurgency. At least that’s an intriguing departure from the script: It’s like the beginning and the end of the Vietnam War at the same time! Obama must feel as if his presidency has been cursed by a malicious wizard; the principal foreign-policy pledge that got him elected, and that he more or less fulfilled, is unraveling as if by magic.

We know who the dark wizard is who cast that spell, but it’s the rest of us who granted him his power. Dick Cheney yearns to fight the Iraq war over again – or fight another and another in Iran or Syria or somewhere else – in the vain hope that things will turn out differently, America’s virility will be restored and his legacy redeemed. That’s not going to happen; rancher togs or not, the Cheney of 2014 is an old and broken man with a fading constituency. But that’s small comfort to the rest of us, not to mention the people of Iraq. He destroyed their nation, bankrupted ours and did his damnedest to transmit the toxic effects of Vietnam to a new generation. One day we’ll be free of that past, presumably, but that day has not come.

http://www.salon.com/2014/06/21/dick_cheney_iraq_and_the_ghosts_of_vietnam/


The day that America will be free of Cheney's and the neo-con's past, as cold and unfeeling as it sounds (and in this case, The Gadfly feels wholly justified in saying this), is the day that they are no longer roaming this earthly existence and plying their trade as war makers and war profiteers.  To put it bluntly, when they are all dead and buried is when America has the opportunity to move on from their noxious and tragic legacy.



----TFG