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PaperclipPerfector  4d ago (text post)   16341 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 17, 2025

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The former Vice President, Secretary of Defense, and Representative for the state of Wyoming, Richard B. "Dick" Cheney (1941 - 2025) was laid to rest today and I have thoughts.

On one hand I have a lot of genuine respect for the man. He had principles and he stuck to them. He didn't try to hedge, or weasel out, he bit the bullet. I don't think that anyone can reasonably claim that they never new where they stood with Dick Cheney. As Ed Morrissey says "RIP to an American Original". On the other hand his legacy is complicated.

For those too young to remember the 2000 election, Cheney was viewed one of the elder statesmen of the Republican party and what we might call today an "enlightened centrist". He and George Bush Jr. (son of Former president George HW Bush) were presented as a return to the norms of civility and collegiality after the chaos, acrimony, and culture-warring that had defined much the Clinton administration. The idea was that by embracing "Compassionate Conservativism" the conflict between traditional conservatives and what we would recognize today as the proto-woke could be resolved. It was a nice idea that did not survive first contact with the enemy. The 2000 election was decided by the supreme court which put both sides on edge, and then 8 months later everything would go up in smoke with the two towers.

This brings us Cheney's legacy. Cheney sought to change the world through democratic reforms imposed by American arms. He was the chief Architect of global war on terror and an ardent supporter of the wider trend of "globalization", give the Communists or the Jihadis a taste of McDonalds and they'll come around to our way of thinking. Again, It was a nice idea that did not survive first contact with the enemy. And because Cheney had been all in, because he hadn't tried to hedge, or weasel out, because the establishment/centrist wings of both parties had adopted his model and backed his every play, there was nowhere to deflect to when everything went to shit both at home and abroad.

He could not claim that "Real Neoliberalism/Compassionate Conservativism has never been tried" or that he only got to implement half of his intended foreign policy because the "enlightened centrists" had been given everything they wanted. The plan was tried, and it failed. Not only did it fail, it failed so spectacularly that many prior supporters including myself turned away in revulsion asking ourselves "what have we done?". Cheney's Legacy is ultimately one of failure. One that would set the conditions for the rise of both the Tea Party and Trump as well as the accelerationist woke at the expense of the of the sort of norms-based centrism espoused by publications like The Bulwark and The Atlantic and Cheney himself.

At the same time, I can not help but see his passing as the passing of an era, and I am not going to wish ill upon the dead.

Much hay is currently being made in certain circles about whether Trump and Vance were snubbing him by not attending the funeral or if they were specifically not invited, but I feel like it's a bullshit distraction, I don't think anyone can reasonably claim that they never knew where they stood with Dick Cheney

Rest In Peace Dick.

Did he fail? They lied about WMD so why wouldn't he lie about his other causes for the war?

He enriched the military industrial complex which was lacking a justification for its budget in 2003. He swamped Europe with migrants pushing the agenda of mass migration and cheap imported labour. He destroyed several countries in the middle east making them easy to bully and extract resources from. Not only that, but he got ordinary republicans on board with creating a surveillance state that knows more about its citizens than stasi did. In his new toasty warm dwelling he probably looks up at Earth with pride as he effectively achieved what he wanted, a global police state run by the US which culture is consumerism.

Nobody "lied about WMD" except Saddam. They were mistaken.

We've collectively memory-holed the anthrax attack on the US in the days after 9/11, which at the the time was a major reason for the WMD claim:

The 2001 Anthrax Attacks were a critical factor in the Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD) claims that sparked the Iraq War. Despite its significance, little systematic work has been done regarding the topic. Existing studies primarily focus on the role of the Military Industrial Complex and intelligence failures as the primary explanations for the origins of the Iraq War. These explanations are limited, as they rely on hindsight biases. This thesis contends that anthrax was the catalyst for WMD claims that sparked the Iraq War. The 2001 Anthrax Attacks reinforced the belief that Iraq harbored WMDs and posed a threat to the U.S. These attacks have often been overshadowed by the 9/11 tragedy and the inability to find WMDs in Iraq. This thesis finds that the Bush Administration viewed these attacks as a significant threat to the U.S. They seized the opportunity that the 2001 Anthrax Attacks presented to formulate WMD allegations and present Iraq as an imminent threat when a direct link between 9/11 and Iraq couldn't be established.

So why were the anthrax attacks tied to Iraq? There were intelligence reports that a 9/11 hijacker was supplied with anthrax by Al-Qaeda at a meeting at the Iraqi consulate in Prague. Never happened, he was never even in Prague at this time. Yet Dick Cheney repeated the allegation as the nation prepared for war with Iraq:

It's been pretty well confirmed that (Atta) did go to Prague, and he did meet with a senior official of the Iraqi intelligence service in (the Czech Republic) last April, several months before the attack.

Ostensibly the source for this lie was Czech intelligence. But LATimes reported something different back in October 2001:

Atta, an Egyptian, is suspected of flying one of the two planes that crashed into the World Trade Center. Iraq has vehemently denied any connection to the attacks and has said that Atta and Ani never met....

“This meeting did not take place,” Iraqi Deputy Prime Minister Tarik Aziz told The Times in Baghdad last week. “It is a lie. We checked with him: ‘Did you ever meet somebody called Atta?’ ” ...

Israeli intelligence officials also reportedly have been pushing the possibility of an Iraqi connection to the terrorist attacks. It could be in Israel’s security interests to see the U.S. take a more aggressive stance against Iraq.

Germany’s mass-circulation Bild newspaper Thursday quoted unidentified Israeli intelligence sources as saying Atta received anthrax spores from Iraqi agents in Prague.

But a U.S. intelligence official, who spoke on condition that he not be further identified, said Friday that Washington has found no evidence indicating that Iraq had provided anthrax to Atta or that Iraq is involved in the bioterrorism attacks.

This is October 27th 2001, less than 2 months after 9/11. Lies about Iraqi WMDs and Iraqi/Al Qaeda connection less than two months after the attack.

Yes, the WMDs were lies manufactured by people with an interest in having the US overthrow Saddam. There is no other reason for a fabrication like this. They lied about WMDs they were not mistaken. Or at least, the key provocateurs lied and traitors like Dick Cheney were just duped. But that's not being "mistaken" that's being lied to at best or at worst knowingly perpetuating the lie as a false pretext for war.

By the way, the consensus is now that the origin of the Anthrax spores was not Iraq, it was from a specific batch of the "Ames" strain that originated from a U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID) laboratory at Fort Detrick, Maryland. But in October 2001 we have these intelligence reports claiming it was supplied by Iraq. Really makes you think...

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