Rare News Desk
It was only a matter of time before Dick Cheney surfaced again, as the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) march further into Iraq.
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Former Vice President Cheney and his daughter Liz penned an op-ed titled “The Collapsing Obama Doctrine” for the Wall Street Journal, which the Washington Post’s Philip Bump called a “PR push for the Cheneys’ new group, Alliance for a Stronger America.”
What it also is, Bump argues, is a veiled poke at Rand Paul’s foreign policy, which is more of a threat to Cheney’s vision than anything President Obama represents.
Below is an excerpt from that article that illustrates Cheney’s thinking:
It is time the president and his allies faced some hard truths: America remains at war, and withdrawing troops from the field of battle while our enemies stay in the fight does not “end” wars. Weakness and retreat are provocative. U.S. withdrawal from the world is disastrous and puts our own security at risk.
This is essentially the same mantra that Cheney used to promote the Iraq War, which — as ISIL’s swift surge shows — has been a failure, and a trillion dollar one at that. Whatever progress the U.S. made in Iraq has been lost in a very short time frame.
Bump believes the op-ed has less to do with where we’ve been or where we are now and more about where the U.S. is going — in 2016.
Particularly if it goes in the direction of Rand Paul.
Paul’s rising influence has made Republican billionaire hawks like Sheldon Adelson declare that they are “ready to take Rand Paul down.” The Kentucky senator was conspicuously absent from an Adelson funded event in March that Ted Cruz and Chris Christie both attended.
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Paul has led or performed well in many recent polls and his generally non-interventionist foreign policy views are now closer to the mainstream than those of Cheney. More Americans are “very reluctant” to get involved militarily overseas than they were just a few years ago.
Cheney’s group Alliance for a Stronger America, however, has a different idea — more of the same. Here are the basic tenets laid out on the website:
- advocate for the policies needed to restore American power and pre-eminence;
- provide information to citizens, policymakers and candidates about the critical national security issues facing the nation;
- explain the indispensable role America and American power must play in the world in order to defeat the broad array of threats we face today;
- fight to restore the strength of America’s military — the greatest fighting force and the greatest force for good the world has ever known; and
- ensure that national security issues are a critical part of America’s national debate and discussion in the coming years and beyond.
Rand Paul has given his opinion on ISIL and, while not completely against limited involvement, he prefers that the Iraqis fight for themselves. Paul has also insisted that any decision by President Obama to reengage militarily in Iraq must go through Congress.
