Review of "Exceptional: Why the World Needs a Powerful America," by Dick Cheney and Liz Cheney

[DonViejo]

The last throes of Dick Cheney

Review of "Exceptional: Why the World Needs a Powerful America," by Dick Cheney and Liz Cheney

By Carlos Lozada September 3 at 12:47 PM

EXCEPTIONAL: Why the World Needs a Powerful America

By Dick Cheney and Liz Cheney

Threshold Editions. 324 pp. $28.

It was a classic Washington split-screen moment.

On May 21, 2009, minutes apart and just a mile and a half away from each other, President Obama and former vice president Dick Cheney offered dueling visions of America’s war on terrorism — of Guantanamo and torture, of surveillance and civil liberties. Speaking at the National Archives, Obama decried the previous administration’s “hasty decisions” and said essential American values had been discarded “as luxuries that we could no longer afford.” Cheney, holding court at the hawkish American Enterprise Institute, defended “enhanced interrogations” as legal and valuable, and warned that “in the fight against terrorism, there is no middle ground, and half-measures keep you half-exposed.”

I was in the second row at Cheney’s speech, and I recall the energy in the room as the former vice president approached the lectern. Only recently out of office, Cheney still mattered. He embodied a worldview that carried sway. In 2009, Obama v. Cheney was a heavyweight prizefight.

Six years later, Cheney is out with a new book on national security and is once again scheduled to deliver a speech at AEI, with Obama again as his foil. But it’s hard to muster the same excitement. It is far from clear that Cheney’s arguments, calcified in the intervening years, wield much influence anymore, even within his own party, or that they should. Rather than a slugfest, this feels like a swan song.

And it is a song he performs, in perfect Cheney pitch, with “Exceptional.” Co-written with his daughter Liz Cheney, the book is part history of America’s role in the world since World War II, part assault on Obama’s record on foreign and defense policy, and part relentlessly militaristic to-do list for the next commander in chief. “Our next president must be committed to restoring America’s power and strength,” the Cheneys write. “Our security and the survival of freedom depend on it.”

In the authors’ telling, America’s influence over world events has been almost entirely benevolent, as leaders from Roosevelt and Truman to Reagan and George W. Bush stared down tyrants and dispensed freedom and security. “We are, as a matter of empirical fact and undeniable history,” the Cheneys explain, “the greatest force for good the world has ever known.” From D-Day through the Cold War and into the age of terror, “security and freedom for millions of people around the globe have depended on America’s military, economic, political, and diplomatic might.”

more
http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/book-party/wp/2015/09/03/the-last-throes-of-dick-cheney/?wpmm=1&wpisrc=nl_popns