Dick Cheney unmasked
Robert Zaller
Issue date: 3/2/07 Section: Ed-Op
- Page 1 of 3 next >
Remember Baghdad Bob? In his original incarnation, he was Mohammed Saeed al-Sahhaf, the information minister for Saddam Hussein who insisted that American forces on the verge of taking Baghdad in April 2003 were either nowhere to be seen or about to be hurled back into the desert. Goebbels was never funnier. As the world could see the U.S. Army overrunning Saddam's capital and soldiers putting their legs up on the couches in his palaces, Baghdad Bob, as Sahhaf had been nicknamed, kept up his pitch, virtually to the moment he was captured himself.
Entertaining as Baghdad Bob was, he wasn't offered a gig on CNN or Fox, or, for that matter, with the U.S. Army itself, which could certainly use his talents to describe the surge. But he lives again, nonetheless.
Our famously reclusive vice president, Dick Cheney, a.k.a. Darth Vader and Lord Voldemort, has come into the open again, channeling Baghdad Bob. Does everyone else see disaster in Iraq, and even the Great Decider concede some setbacks? D.C. Dick sees "great successes." Do our erstwhile allies in the Coalition of the Willing do a Lost Battalion, and does even faithful Tony Blair - having already pared the British contingent in Iraq from 40,000 to 7,100 - announce a further cut? Surely that is a sign of "progress" in Basra, where the beleaguered Brits have long since thrown in the towel to Shiite militias.
Dick Cheney, the man whose shark's grin could never be confused with a smile, has finally reached heights of absurdity even Baghdad Bob couldn't scale. After all, Bob was just wrong about losing a city. Cheney can't see an entire war getting away. At least, he says so.
When we debriefed Baghdad Bob, we discovered that he actually believed his fabrications, because Iraqi command and control was so degraded that no one actually knew where the American army was anymore. Maybe D.C. Dick is still getting his intelligence from weed-smoking Curveball, the famous agent who sold the Pentagon intelligence on Iraq's WMDs and its burgeoning nuclear arsenal. Or maybe he's just a graduate of the School of the Big Lie, which teaches that the bigger the whopper and the more often it's repeated, the more readily it's believed. Hey, at this point it's worth a shot.
Entertaining as Baghdad Bob was, he wasn't offered a gig on CNN or Fox, or, for that matter, with the U.S. Army itself, which could certainly use his talents to describe the surge. But he lives again, nonetheless.
Our famously reclusive vice president, Dick Cheney, a.k.a. Darth Vader and Lord Voldemort, has come into the open again, channeling Baghdad Bob. Does everyone else see disaster in Iraq, and even the Great Decider concede some setbacks? D.C. Dick sees "great successes." Do our erstwhile allies in the Coalition of the Willing do a Lost Battalion, and does even faithful Tony Blair - having already pared the British contingent in Iraq from 40,000 to 7,100 - announce a further cut? Surely that is a sign of "progress" in Basra, where the beleaguered Brits have long since thrown in the towel to Shiite militias.
Dick Cheney, the man whose shark's grin could never be confused with a smile, has finally reached heights of absurdity even Baghdad Bob couldn't scale. After all, Bob was just wrong about losing a city. Cheney can't see an entire war getting away. At least, he says so.
When we debriefed Baghdad Bob, we discovered that he actually believed his fabrications, because Iraqi command and control was so degraded that no one actually knew where the American army was anymore. Maybe D.C. Dick is still getting his intelligence from weed-smoking Curveball, the famous agent who sold the Pentagon intelligence on Iraq's WMDs and its burgeoning nuclear arsenal. Or maybe he's just a graduate of the School of the Big Lie, which teaches that the bigger the whopper and the more often it's repeated, the more readily it's believed. Hey, at this point it's worth a shot.
Be the first to comment on this story