Cheney Beats the Drums of War

Ajami also said, in an astonishing Wall Street Journal op-ed in June, that I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, who was convicted of perjury and obstruction of justice, deserved better. In an "open letter" to Bush, Ajami wrote: "Scooter Libby was a soldier in your -- our -- war in Iraq, he was chief of staff to a vice president who had become a lightning rod to the war's critics.... He can't be left behind as a casualty of a war our country had once proudly claimed as its own."

As for Lewis, here's Cheney's quote yesterday: "Dr. Bernard Lewis explained the terrorists' reasoning this way: 'During the Cold War,' Dr. Lewis wrote, 'two things came to be known and generally recognized in the Middle East concerning the two rival superpowers. If you did anything to annoy the Russians, punishment would be swift and dire. If you said or did anything against the Americans, not only would there be no punishment; there might even be some possibility of reward, as the usual anxious procession of diplomats and politicians, journalists and scholars and miscellaneous others came with their usual pleading inquiries: "What have we done to offend you? What can we do to put it right?"' End quote."

First there is the content of the quote. As blogger Gregory Djerejian observes: "It's really an appallingly strange time in our country. We have a singularly powerful Vice-President (compared to any of his predecessors) -- openly quite enamored by the tactics employed by the Soviet Union -- our former arch-foe whose human rights standards we derided."

Then there is the author of the quote. As Zakaria notes, Lewis last year"wrote an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal predicting that on Aug. 22, 2006, President Ahmadinejad was going to end the world. The date, he explained, 'is the night when many Muslims commemorate the night flight of the Prophet Muhammad on the winged horse Buraq, first to 'the farthest mosque,' usually identified with Jerusalem, and then to heaven and back. This might well be deemed an appropriate date for the apocalyptic ending of Israel and if necessary of the world'. This would all be funny if it weren't so dangerous."

Cheney's Speech

More from the text of Cheney's speech:

The vice president noted his long association with the institute. "Most of you knew me long before anyone called me Darth Vader," he said, adding that his top national security assistant, John Hannah, was formerly the institute's deputy director.

He defended the CIA's use of interrogation techniques that many would call torture: "There's been a good deal of misinformation about the CIA detainee program, and unfair comments have been made about America's intentions and the conduct of America's intelligence officers," he said.

"The United States is a country that takes human rights seriously. We do not torture. We're proud of our country and what it stands for. We expect all who serve America to conduct themselves with honor."

Cheney laid down a marker that could come back to haunt him: "Success in Iraq will confirm our good intentions in the Middle East more than words alone ever could."

And he unleashed a novel argument for why the Shia Iranian government would have anything against the U.S.-supported majority-Shia government in Iraq: "Fearful of a strong, independent, Arab Shia community emerging in Iraq, one that seeks religious guidance not in Qom, Iran, but from traditional sources of Shia authority in Najaf and Karbala, the Iranian regime also aims to keep Iraq in a state of weakness that prevents Baghdad from presenting a threat to Tehran."

Blaming Iran for Iraq

Ann Scott Tyson writes in The Washington Post: "Gen. David H. Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan C. Crocker have concluded that Shiite extremists pose a rising threat to the U.S. effort in Iraq, as the relative influence of Sunni insurgent groups such as al-Qaeda in Iraq has diminished drastically because of ongoing U.S. operations."

Their "updated plan anticipates shifting the U.S. military effort to focus more on countering Shiite militias -- some backed by Iran -- that have generated new violence as they battle for power in the south and elsewhere in Iraq, said senior military and diplomatic officials familiar with the plan."