cheney: "we accomplished nearly everything we set out to do"

[Allan Guest Post]

Every so often at wmtc, a commenter will post about how ill-prepared or clueless the Bush/Cheney administration was for any number of disasters that appears to have gone wrong in the United States from 2001-2008, such as 9/11, Katrina and Iraq.

Laura and I disagree.

We always say that, if anything, those guys were extraordinarily competent. Nearly everything that happened under their reign was successful - and by design. Freely working their evil in what is supposedly a democracy, they likely were successful beyond their wildest dreams. Of course, they could have done things differently -- made decisions that would have left fewer lives lost or ruined, fewer tens of billions of taxpayer dollars wasted or "unaccounted for" (wink wink) -- but saving lives and frugal spending were not among their goals.

Anyone who examines the historical record will see that -- to take the three examples listed above -- it is beyond doubt that the Bush/Cheney administration ignored clear and precise warnings in the weeks before 9/11, then offered no resistance that morning, as the attacks unfolded; they actively prevented rescuers and supplies from reaching dying victims in New Orleans; and they created a set of circumstances that sealed the fate of their own troops -- and Iraqis -- in Iraq.

Now, in his first interview since leaving office, along comes Dick Cheney:

I think it's my general sense of where we are with respect to Iraq at the end of now, what, nearly six years is we accomplished nearly everything we set out to do.

Cheney then mentions some silliness like "a democratically-governed Iraq" -- because that was one of the publicly offered main objectives -- but he's speaking the truth.

In so many areas, from food safety to the environment to repealing sections of the Bill of Rights and habeas corpus to the banking crisis and hundreds of other things that hit our front pages for a day and then vanished from view, the Bush junta accomplished nearly everything they set out to do. And of course, many events simply don't happen by accident: Guantanamo Bay, Abu Ghraib, Falluja, Haditha, and various other incidents that, when taken together, show what is clearly standard operating procedure in Iraq.

The Buch/Cheney administration was a veritable juggernaut of competence. And the biggest reason for their success was that the "other" party in the US either stood silently by or actively assisted.

In fact, Cheney et al. would have been able to accomplish exactly none of their goals if they had not rigged the results of two presidential elections, crimes about which, considering their magnitude, no one ever made a peep.