Vice President Cheney’s Biography – The Iraq War

Recently, several biographies were published by previous members of President George W. Bush’s cabinet. All of them, including President Bush, Vice President D. Cheney, and Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld provided their personal views about the role they played in regard to the Iraqi invasion in 2003.

The latest biography is written by Mr. Cheney and is called “In My Time”. Mr. Cheney presents strong rationale from his point of view in support of the Iraq war. He expresses no regrets, even about the false reports used by President Bush to justify the Iraq invasion. The president used the secret report that Saddam Hussein obtained uranium material from Niger to be used as weapons of mass destruction, despite the fact that the director of the CIA, Mr. George Tenet, warned the administration that the report was false. The president used the report in his “State of the Union” address in 2003 to justify his plan for the invasion of Iraq. He said Iraq posed a serious threat to the security of the U.S. Mr. Cheney criticized Mr. Tenet for publicly stating that the report was not valid.

Mr. Cheney even went to extremes by saying that no apology is needed for the use of that report. Furthermore, Mr. Cheney criticized Mr. Colin Powell, the previous secretary of state, and Ms. Condoleeza Rice, Powell’s successor, for not cooperating with the administration in regard to various foreign policy issues. Mr. Cheney referred to Ms. Rice as a naïve secretary of state who tried to reach an agreement with North Korea regarding the WMD. Some of those whom Cheney criticized, such as Colin Powell, responded by blasting Mr. Cheney for his “cheap shots” on CBS’s “Face the Nation”. (8/28/2011). Mr. Powell challenged and criticized Cheney’s claim that Powell was pushed out of the Bush administration in 2004.

It seems that the vice president was very critical of all of those who were not supportive of the Iraq war. Mr. Cheney was also pushing for the bombing of the suspected Syrian Nuclear site, but no members of the Bush cabinet were supportive of such an idea. That suspected Syrian site was bombed by Israel in 2007. Such an act of aggression by Israel didn’t come as a surprise when Mr. Cheney failed to do the job for them. It is not a hidden fact to say that Mr. Cheney was a strong supporter of Israel and an active member of the neo-con group. The vice president was also a member of President Reagan’s cabinet during the 1980s. During that period, other neo-con members such as Paul Wolfowitz, began to plot the invasion of Iraq for two important reasons.

First, Mr. Cheney was connected to the American oil companies and he was aware of Iraq’s huge oil reserve. In a public meeting in Britain, Mr. Cheney said that Iraq is not a democratic state, and unfortunately will be the state that will sell the last barrel of oil.

Mr. Cheney’s strategy was to invade Iraq and regain the oilfields that were nationalized by Saddam Hussein during the early 1970s. The second rationale for the invasion of Iraq was to remove Saddam Hussein’s government because he and other members of the neo-con group thought that Iraq posed a threat to Israel. For that reason and others, Israel bombed Iraq’s nuclear reactor during the Reagan administration in 1987.