President Obama’s weakness and desire to please Iran has placed in front of Congress an “intricately-crafted capitulation” that strengthens Tehran at Washington’s expense to the point where it will become capable of attacking the United States, former Vice President Dick Cheney said Tuesday.
“What President Obama is asking the United States Congress to do is unique — historically and dangerously unique. The results may be catastrophic,” he said during a speech at the conservative American Enterprise Institute.
“They have presented us with a deal that strengthens our adversaries, weakens our allies and puts our own security at risk.”
Cheney also slammed Senate Democrats who were hoping to filibuster a resolution to disapprove of the deal in a bid to avoid a vote this week.
“This vote in Congress will have profound consequences,” he said. “Anyone unwilling to stand up and be counted on this deal should not be serving in elected office.”
The White House was quick to strike back at the former vice president, noting in a YouTube video released before the speech that he was one of the architects of the invasion of Iraq in 2003.
The video was titled: “Vice President Dick Cheney: Wrong Then, Wrong Now.”
Cheney — whose credibility suffered after it was discovered that U.S. officials had based the invasion decision in a large part on overestimates of Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein’s nuclear ambitions — was unrepentant.
He noted that Iran temporarily suspended its nuclear weapons program in the wake of the U.S. ouster of Saddam, and that Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi had volunteered to give up his own program as well.
“He had watched the fate we had delivered to Saddam and he didn’t want to be next,” Cheney said of Gadhafi.
Obama’s concessions to Iran, particularly allowing Tehran to continue enriching uranium, have not only “gutted” the international nonproliferation regime and paved the path for the development of nuclear-tipped ballistic missiles capable of hitting the United States, Cheney said, but also “these concessions will further one of Iran’s main objectives in the Middle East: to drive the United States out.
“Arming and funding Iran while simultaneously providing them a pathway to a nuclear arsenal is not an act of peace,” he said. “It’s not, as President Obama claims, the only alternative to war. It is madness.”
