How Strong Do We Look Now?

Juan Cole rips into Dick Cheney's continued lies:

"Reuters reports, "Cheney said Americans were safer and he stood by prewar characterizations of Iraq as a threat despite the failure to find weapons of mass destruction and new warnings by Cheney and other administration officials that another major terrorist attack may be coming."

Iraq was not a threat to the United States. Period. Let me repeat the statistics as of the late 1990s:

U.S. population: 295 million
Iraq population: 24 million

U.S. per capita annual income: $37,600
Iraq per capita annual income: $700

U.S. nuclear warheads: 10,455
Iraq nuclear warheads: 0

U.S. tons of lethal chemical weapons (1997): 31,496
Iraq tons of lethal chemical weapons (1997): 0

While a small terrorist organization could hit the U.S. because it has no return address, a major state could not hope to avoid retribution and therefore would be deterred. Cheney knows that Ba'athist Iraq posed no threat to the U.S. He is simply lying. I was always careful not to accuse him of lying before the war because who knows what is in someone else's mind? Maybe he believed his own bullsh*t. But there is no longer any doubt that Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction, no active nuclear weapons program, no ability to deliver anything lethal to the U.S. homeland, and no operational cooperation with al-Qaeda. These things are not matters of opinion. They are indisputable. Ipso facto, if an intelligent person continues to allege them, he is prevaricating..."