Cheney's basically honest memoir

I know, I never expected to write that headline. But I have
to give credit where it is due. I found former Vice
President Cheney's memoir generally to be honest, and also better written
than many similar books.

I had expected it to be a blamefest like other the memoirs
of other Bush Administration hardliners, such as those by Donald Rumsfeld,
Douglas Feith and Tommy R. Franks, that throw out a lot of accusations, but
rarely face up to their own mistakes. But Cheney addresses many of the problems
and embarrassments of his life. He is clear-sighted about the failures of the
1991 Gulf War, writing that Saddam Hussein "was able to turn the fact that he
had stood up to and survived a massive assault into a personal victory." (P.
224) He explains why he thought it necessary to take a moment on the Senate
floor to tell Sen. Patrick Leahy to go fuck himself. He even walks us through
how he happened to shoot a hunting buddy, and touches repeatedly on his two
drunk driving arrests as a youth.

A big exception to the tone of reasonable self-examination
is his treatment of his speech to the VFW Convention in August 2002, an event I
consider to be as close as we came to having a declaration of war against Iraq.
He discusses his speech, but skips its most memorable line, his argument-ending
assertion that, "Simply stated, there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has
weapons of mass destruction. There is no doubt that he is amassing them to use
against our friends, against our allies, and against us." This would be a far
better and more memorable book if Cheney had seriously pondered how he could
have been so wrong. I am not looking for an abject apology, but had hoped for
at least a meliorative meditation.

(There is a pattern here: The bigger mistake, the less
attention he pays to it. I've noticed this frequently in the military, where
generals get fired for personal indiscretions but not for professional
bumbling. I suggest we call it Yingling's Rule,
for the observation by the lieutenant colonel of that name that nowadays a
private who loses his rifle receives more punishment than a general who loses a
war.)  

The real disappointment to me of the book is that it has little of
interest to say about Iraq, and even less about Afghanistan. I get the
impression that everyone in the Bush Administration decided around the fall of
2004 that it was someone else's problem. But again