‘We will…be greeted as liberators.’
— Dick Cheney, March 16, 2003
The most telling response to Dick Cheney’s assertion on NBC’s Meet the Press that we’d be greeted in Iraq as liberators came from the man himself, in 2006 on CBS’s Face the Nation. When Bob Schieffer asked the vice president if his statement had increased skepticism of the war, Cheney responded, “No, I think it has less to do with the statements we’ve made, which I think were basically accurate and reflect reality, than it does the fact that there is a constant sort of perception, if you will, that’s created because what is newsworthy is the car bomb in Baghdad, it’s not all the work that went on that day in 15 other provinces in terms of making progress in rebuilding Iraq.” To recap: first Cheney says he was right (he wasn’t) and then he blames media distortion for the fact that people won’t believe him. It’s hard to fake being greeted as a liberator; to this day, though, Cheney continues to pretend as if it had been so.
BY RAINA KELLEY
Kelley is a staff writer for NEWSWEEK.
BessingerBlog 
Remember all the Iraqis proudly holding up their purple fingers after voting in their elections? Americans liberated them.
That’s what gets me about liberals (and Newsweek might as well be published by MoveOn); the flat-out bigotry they display. Those Iraqis were better off living under a dictator who disappeared his citizens on a regular basis. Forget the rape rooms and torture chambers, real torture, with blood and missing limbs, for the fun of it, unlike the waterboarding that saved the lives of many of your countrymen. No, Arabs can’t handle democracy; like most brown people they’re happier under a murderous dictator.
Honestly, Tony do you post this sort of thing just to bait me?
Maybe Raina Kelley is partially correct about Cheney’s overstating our liberator status — although I do remember a jubilant crowd hitting the huge, just-fallen statue of Saddam with their shoes — but it appears to me that our objectives for a free and self-governing Iraq, undertaken against Force 12 political headwinds, were mostly met, “Mission Accomplished” signs and Dick Cheney quotations notwithstanding.
When will Raina Kelley write a similarly dour piece on Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s proclamation during The Surge that “the war is lost”? When can I read her policy retrospective of then-Senator Joe Biden’s insistence that Iraq be split into 3 countries?
These seem to be both moral and intellectual failures a magnitude or two greater than Dick Cheney’s stupid quote.
BTW, I *like* Cheney. He shoots lawyers. And probably hippies, too.
SLOGANS FOR DICK CHENEY IN 2012
“I know what the hell I’m doing.”
“You’d rather me on your side than against you.”
“Experience, leadership, normal-sized ears.”
“I shoot my friends in the face with a shotgun. What do you think I’ll do to America’s enemies?”
“I’m what the Mayans predicted.”
“Heart attacks don’t even slow me down.”
“The only time I’ll bow before a foreign leader is in preparation for an uppercut.”
“I already control everything; let’s just make it official.”
“Torturing terrorists may not make reliable intelligence, but does make reliable fun.”
“If I’m busy being president, I won’t have time to eat your children’s souls.”
“Say ‘Go @#$% yourself!’ to the entire world.”
“Vote for me and I’ll consider not strangling this box of puppies.”
“I’ll piledrive a foreign leader before I’ll bow to one.”
“Probably not going to win a Nobel Peace Prize.”
“KSM will get to plead his case to my shotgun.”
“You want a change? How about a president who doesn’t give a rat’s ass what anyone thinks about him.”
“You don’t inaugurate me; you unleash me.”
“I will say, ‘Mr. Ahmadinejad, tear off your own face.’ And he will do as I tell him.”
Dick Cheney is as close to pure evil as I ever want to see in this lifetime.
MiserblOF, when did you leave the monastery?
I always think that you want the meanest dog in the fight and we are in a fight.
“Evil flourishes when good men do nothing”- Edmund Burke