The war of words over foreign policy is back on between former vice president Dick Cheney and the Obama administration.
In a speech Wednesday night, Cheney suggested that the president was afraid to decide whether to send more US troops to Afghanistan.
“The White House must stop dithering while America’s armed forces are in danger,’’ Cheney told the conservative Center for Security Policy. “It’s time for President Obama to do what it takes to win a war he has repeatedly and rightly called a war of necessity.’’
“Make no mistake. Signals of indecision out of Washington hurt our allies and embolden our adversaries,’’ Cheney added.
Yesterday, White House spokesman Robert Gibbs hit back at Cheney, saying that Obama is taking the time to make sure he gets the strategy right.
“What Vice President Cheney calls dithering, President Obama calls his solemn responsibility to the men and women in uniform and to the American public. I think we’ve all seen what happens when somebody doesn’t take that responsibility seriously,’’ Gibbs said during his daily briefing.
Gibbs also blamed the Bush-Cheney team for allowing the situation to worsen in Afghanistan, asserting that the 21,000-troop increase Obama approved in March had been sitting on their desks for months. “I find it interesting that he’s blaming us for something that he didn’t see fit to do over, best I can tell, seven years of a war in Afghanistan,’’ Gibbs said.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi also came to the president’s defense, saying he needs the facts to make “a very difficult decision.’’
She told reporters on Capitol Hill that Cheney’s remarks were not constructive, adding, “He’s forgotten whose administration made matters worse in Afghanistan by their neglect.’’
Senator Jack Reed of Rhode Island, who sits on the Armed Services Committee and recently visited Afghanistan, also said Obama is right to take the time for a full policy review.
“The same politicians who were demanding that the current president stop dithering and do whatever his generals suggest forget that the previous administration ignored and underresourced our commanders and soldiers in Afghanistan for nearly eight years,’’ Reed said at a news conference.
Senator Lamar Alexander, Republican of Tennessee, also sided with Obama, who he said “is entitled to take sufficient time to decide what our long-term role ought to be in Afghanistan.’’
“Then I think he should come to Congress and say to the American people what that plan is and see if he can persuade us and all of the American people of the rightness of it, because he needs to have support all the way through to the end of that mission,’’ Alexander said on MSNBC.
Cheney had largely been off the public stage since a high-profile face-off in May with Obama on the war on terror. In back-to-back speeches before different audiences, Obama and the former vice president each forcefully laid out their sharply different views on how to keep America safe from terrorism, the effectiveness of harsh interrogations, and whether the Guantanamo Bay detainees pose an imminent danger if brought to US soil.
