I'm sick of the lies.

Well, well. It looks like our local Yahoo group has its own troll. Hooray. This troll suggested in a Saturday posting that Kerry will ask UN permission to defend America, and Kerry voted against weapons systems, and what makes us think that France or Germany will get on board during a Kerry Administration? Here's my reply: Bush hasn’t responded forcefully. Bush’s policies haven’t left American any safer. It is by the Grace of God that we haven’t had another major terrorist incident on US soil – not due to some wonderful strategery by the Bush Administration. Even worse than “puffing” the effectiveness of their anti-terror efforts, the Bush administration just plain-old lied about it. In April, they said terror attacks in 2003 had decreased. That was a lie. After a compliant media and marginally interested electorate had absorbed that bit of disinformation, the administration “adjusted” the number in June to reflect that significant terror attacks were at a 21-year high. Gosh, I feel so safe. So does Madrid, and Beslan, and Iraq, and Indonesia, and the Phillipines. So extraordinarily secure. /sarcasm - To quote David Cross, even Nader would have bombed Afghanistan after 9/11. The problem is, our effort in Afghanistan to root out Taliban, al Qaeda and other militant islamist forces not only took a back seat to Iraq, it ended up in the way-back third row seat. Afghanistan today is as bad a mess as it was when we invaded, if not more so. Warlords control their personal fiefdoms, while Karzai’s government struggles to obtain control. We should be doing everything in our power to help Karzai out and re-unify Afghanistan, but we’re not. Why? - Iraq is becoming the quagmire many hoped it wouldn’t. Of course, G.H.W. Bush, in his own memoirs, written 5 years ago, explained that he didn’t invade the remainder of Iraq in 1991 because it would become an uncontrollable quagmire, which we would still have been occupying in 1999. If only G.W. Bush had consulted with his own father, rather than the neocons or Jesus Christ. - The “ask the United Nations to go to war” is a red herring and beside the point. No one should ever suggest that the US needs UN permission to defend itself. As for Iraq, however, we weren’t defending ourselves. Bill Clinton didn’t get UN approval for NATO to invade Kosovo, because it was pretty clear that the Russians would have vetoed it. Acting in Kosovo without UN approval didn’t somehow render it illegal or wrong. In the case of Kosovo, where there was clear and uncontroverted evidence of genocide on the European continent, which was adversely affecting the security of NATO member Greece, NATO had a right if not a duty to act, without regard to the UN. Iraq, however, wasn’t posing any sort of immediate or real threat to anyone outside of Iraq’s own borders. Sure, Iraq was defying existing UN resolutions by not allowing free and unfettered inspections, but diplomatic resources hadn’t been exhausted, and the Blix inspectors hadn’t been allowed to complete their work. Specifically – the only legal justification that could be offered to invade and occupy the sovereign State of Iraq was that it had failed to obey UN resolutions on WMDs. In 2002-2003, Blix and his 200 inspectors were allowed 6 months by Washington to look for illegal weapons programs. The only thing they found was a missile system that could travel marginally beyond 150 km radius. In 2003-2004, over 100,000 coalition troops occupying the entirety of Iraq have failed to locate any illegal weapons programs. That means: a) Iraq didn’t have any WMDs that were prohibited by UN resolutions, and b) Saddam played the neocons and Bush for fools. - The US never made a real effort to get France and Germany to support the war in Iraq. We sent non-diplomatic staff like Donald Rumsfeld to Berlin and Paris to essentially demand obeisance from those two countries. It is bad – in this case disastrous – diplomacy to go to a sovereign ally and demand fealty in connection with a politically explosive and factually dubious international military adventure that is bereft of any connection to any war on terror. Predictably, (and probably as Washington had hoped), Berlin & Paris rejected Washington’s demands and told Rumsfeld to go do what he thought he needed to do. When Iraq became the magnet for terrorists it is today, as a result of the complete power vacuum left by the abolition of a 40-year-old totalitarian dictatorship and its armed forces (which could have been, and should have been predicted by our government), Bush went begging for help from Germany and France. “Old Europe” wasn’t biting. 5. All we did in Iraq was replace a despot with what is slowly brewing to become a civil war. Nice work, Bush. 6. “Kerry voted against most of the weapons systems” is an ignorant parroting of Bush-Cheney talking points. In the wake of the breakdown of the Soviet Union, Bush’s own father talked about a “New World Order” – we were unsure what the death of the cold war, and the bilateral political dynamic would bring. What it’s brought is terrorism. Primarily radical Sunni Islamist terrorism. Go ask Dick Cheney. Back in the early 90’s, Kerry was voting against the funding of certain weapons systems because the Bush Pentagon was ASKING CONGRESS to do so. Dick Cheney (the Sec Def who never served a day in the military, but sure knows his way around Defense Contractors), actually went to congress and complain that they weren’t CUTTING ENOUGH SYSTEMS.

In March of this year, Cheney attacked Kerry for having "repeatedly voted against weapons systems for the military," hammering the senator for voting "against the Apache helicopter, against the Tomahawk cruise missile, against even the Bradley Fighting Vehicle." He said this record has "given us ample doubts about [Kerry's] judgment and the attitude he brings to bear on vital issues of national security." What Cheney leaves out of his stump speeches is the ironic fact that almost all of the cuts Kerry voted for were endorsed or originally proposed by Cheney himself. At issue is not the cuts themselves, but the hypocrisy of Cheney attacking an opponent who merely followed his lead. Cheney accuses Kerry of calling for "major reductions or outright cancellations of many of our most important weapons systems"; Bush ads attack the senator for voting "against 13 weapons systems for our troops" over 20 years. But it was Defense Secretary Cheney who gloated that he had "put an end to more than 100 systems" in less than three years. In December 1991, he bragged to the Washington Post that he was setting "an all-time record as Defense Secretary for canceling or stopping production" of weapons and equipment. And Cheney has gotten specific. He regularly attacks Kerry's vote against the B-2 stealth bomber in October 1990. But seven months earlier, Cheney had put forth the proposal to cut the B-2 bomber program. Cheney cites Kerry's vote against the AH-64 Apache helicopter. But it was Cheney who told Congress in 1989, "I forced the Army to make choices.... I recommended that we cancel the AH-64 program two years out." Cheney slams Kerry's vote against the F-14 aircraft in October 1990; according to the Post, Cheney "asked Congress to kill" the F-14 in 1991 and had been "skeptical" of a proposal to continue production of the planes as early as 1990. Cheney hammers Kerry for voting against the F-16 aircraft and the Trident submarine, yet Kerry was merely endorsing cancellations proposed by Cheney – who, according to The Boston Globe, had "decided the military already [had] enough" of those weapons. Cheney accuses Kerry of voting against "even the Bradley Fighting Vehicle." But in 1991 it was Cheney's Pentagon that said it wanted "to terminate such Gulf War veterans as the... Bradley Fighting Vehicle." At one point, Cheney told the Post he had terminated "the F-14, F-15 and F-16 fighters, the A-6, A-12, AV-8B and P-3 Navy and Marine planes, and the Army's Apache helicopter and M-1A1 tank." Five of these weapons systems are listed by the Bush campaign in its attempts to chastise Kerry for his anti-defense votes. Cheney was so successful at cutting weapons that The Boston Globe worried "The Army's cupboard is left particularly bare... [it] will soon have virtually no major weapons in production." Cheney has even gotten specific about dates, condemning Kerry for supposedly calling for defense cuts "in 1984, in the middle of the Cold War." But it was near the end of 1984, at the height of Cold War tensions, that Cheney told the Washington Post that President Reagan needed to "take a whack" at defense if he wanted to be a credible commander-in-chief. If Reagan "doesn't really cut defense," Cheney told the Post, "he becomes the No. 1 special pleader in town." Cheney excoriates Kerry for being "deeply irresponsible" on intelligence issues. As evidence, he cites a proposal in the 1990s by Kerry and Republican Senator Arlen Specter that would have slightly reduced intelligence funding. First and foremost, Kerry's proposal was small potatoes compared to GOP efforts to cut intelligence. Bush's own nominee to head the CIA, Representative Porter Goss, authored legislation that would have slashed 20 percent of the budget for human intelligence two years after the first World Trade Center attack. But more importantly, Kerry's proposal was nothing compared to Cheney's shortsighted effort to stifle intelligence reforms in the name of retaining his own personal power. As the Federation of American Scientists (FAS) reports, "Some of the most important intelligence reforms proposed by the 9-11 Commission, including the creation of a Director of National Intelligence (DNI), might have been adopted over a decade ago if not for the opposition of the Secretary of Defense at the time, Dick Cheney." Specifically, in a March 1992 letter to Congress, Cheney defended the status quo and objected to legislation that would have taken some of his powers away in order to create a new Director of National Intelligence. In the letter, Cheney wrote that intelligence reforms proposed by Congress "would seriously impair the effectiveness" of government and specifically opposed a "single, national intelligence 'czar.'"

Cheney: was he wrong then, or is he wrong now?