Dick Cheney Is Bombing Iran Right Now, In His 'Heart'

If only he were still in charge, said no one

In an alternate universe that, thank the maker, exists only in the fevered imagination of Dark Lord Dick, wherein a majority of Americans democratically elected Cheney (or his sockpuppet George, whatever), we are preparing to shock-n-awe Iran right ... about .... now:  

In a speech slamming President Obama's Iran deal -- which Congress is debating this week -- former Vice President Dick Cheney suggested that only the threat of military action could prevent Iran from developing a nuclear weapons program.

Cheney, in his capacity as a private citizen who has no authority over anything, set forth a list of demands for Iran regarding its nuclear program that, in Cheney's never-wrong opinion, is far superior to the agreement made between actual world leaders to contain and monitor Iran's nuclear program:

"If Iran chooses not to do so, they must understand the U.S. stands ready to take military action to ensure they do not acquire a nuclear weapon," Cheney said, receiving applause from the audience. He went on to outline previous circumstances when the U.S. and its allies used force to attack a country's nuclear weapons program. [...]

"Iran will not be convinced to abandon its programs peacefully unless it knows it faces a military action if it refuses to do so."

This, as we all recall from our revisionist history textbooks, was the same highly effective strategy employed by the Cheney administration to force Iraq to abandon its weapons program, thereby preventing a war that has lasted more than a decade, bankrupted America, and cost thousands of lives, in the name of peace and liberty.

Of course, as Cheney explained to Chris Wallace on "Fox News Sunday," all of these threats of military force against Iran could have been avoided if only the Obama administration had forced the Cheney administration to do something about Iran's nuclear program back when Cheney was still in the Oval Office:

“You and President Bush, the Bush-Cheney administration, dealt with Iran for eight years, and I think it was fair to say that there was never any real, serious military threat,” Wallace noted. “Iran went from zero known centrifuges in operation to more than 5,000.”

“So in fairness, didn’t you leave — the Bush-Cheney administration — leave President Obama with a mess?” the Fox News host asked.

In fairness, and also in reality, yes, that's exactly what happened. The Bush-Cheney administration dropped a stinky dirty diarrhea dookie in Iraq, and Afghanistan, and some spots throughout "Old Europe," and Dick has been complaining ever since that President Obama hasn't wiped his crusty bunghole with a warm enough towelette. But in the iniquitous swamp that is Dick's brain, that's not how it happened at all:

“I don’t think of it that way,” Cheney replied. “There was military action that had an impact on the Iranians, it was when we took down Saddam Hussein. There was a period of time when they stopped their program because they were scared that what we did to Saddam, we were going to do to them next.”

“But the centrifuges went from zero to 5,000,” Wallace pressed.

“Well, they may have well have gone but that happened on Obama’s watch, not on our watch,” Cheney wrongly insisted.

“No, no, no,” Wallace fired back. “By 2009, they were at 5,000.”

We are completelynotshocked that Dick oh so casually blamed the Obama administration for something that happened under the Cheney administration. We are, however, the slightest bit shocked that Chris Wallace pointed out that Dick Cheney is 100 percent completely opposite-of-that WRONG. But shrug, oh well, Dick still thinks it's Obama's fault anyway.

Meanwhile, in this world of liberally biased reality, Cheney's successor has managed to not only secure the necessary votes for his deal with Iran to avoid bombing the country to smithereens for the next 10 years at least, but he now has enough support in the Senate to prevent Republicans who want war today, war tomorrow, war forever!!! from passing a resolution telling the president just how much they think he sucks for not letting them do war to Iran without all this waste-of-time "diplomacy":

President Obama has clinched the 41 votes he needs to block a resolution disapproving of the Iran nuclear deal, sealing an important political victory over Republicans.

It's a real shame we don't live in the fantasy fugue state of conservative imaginations, isn't it? Instead of dick-swinging and bomb-dropping and further destabilizing an already FUBAR'd region, and leading to the creation of even more powerful terrorist organizations that make has-been al Qaeda look like a group of Quaker grandma, we have to go through this pointless exercise of trying to avoid that. At least if Obama's crazy idea of trying something new for a change fails, we always have endless war as a back-up plan.

[ TPM / Rawstory / The Hill ]