Maureen Dowd, "Darth Vader Vents": Crazy Dick Cheney?

Although former vice president Dick Cheney is now 70-years-old, and his past antics are now all but forgotten by a world consumed by a devastating economic crisis, New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd revives the memory of her ageing nemesis in an op-ed entitled "Darth Vader Vents" (http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/28/opinion/sunday/dowd-darth-vader-vents.html). Reviewing in her inimitable way Cheney's recently published memoir "In My Time," Dowd recounts one of the vice president's more poignant vignettes:

"Cheney says that in 2007, he told President Bush, who had already been pulled into diplomacy by Condi Rice: 'I believed that an important first step would be to destroy the reactor in the Syrian desert.'

At a session with most of the National Security Council, he made his case for a strike on the reactor. It would enhance America’s tarnished credibility in the Arab world, he argued, (not bothering to mention who tarnished it), and demonstrate the country’s 'seriousness.'

'After I finished,' he writes, 'the president asked, ‘Does anyone here agree with the vice president?’ Not a single hand went up around the room.'”

Another example of Dick Cheney's recklessness?

Before playing devil's advocate, I would first observe that I have consistently opposed America's ground involvement in Afghanistan, which has proven catastrophically costly and senseless. I also opposed the Second Gulf War, which destroyed the delicate balance of power between rival monstrous regimes in Iraq and Iran.

But let's suppose that in 1981 Israel had not destroyed Iraq's Osirak nuclear reactor in an operation sharply condemned by the United Nations Security Council and General Assembly. Might it have been possible for Saddam Hussein, armed with nuclear weapons, to have annexed Kuwait in 1990 without meaningful opposition?

In 2007, was Israel mistaken to have destroyed the nuclear reactor under construction with North Korean assistance in the Deir ez-Zor region of Syria? Given the atrocities Assad has visited upon his own people in recent months, does anyone question the danger that nuclear weapons in the hands of this tyrant might have posed? Currently, there is no small amount of concern within Western security agencies regarding the destination of Assad's stockpiled chemical weaponry, should his regime fall.

Was Dick Cheney altogether out to lunch? You decide.