So, I was talking politics with an older relative today, and they asked me what people online were saying about Dick Cheney's funeral. I pointed out to them that most younger people hate Dick Cheney with a passion and they aren't really talking about him. Then my relative went into a spiel about how younger people who I talk to online don't know what they're talking about and didn't live through the 90s and 2000s. This guy does have very "neocon" style national security opinions, but it just came off as very condescending to me.
People under 40 don't like Dick Cheney because he got us into the Iraq war, which we had no business being in. I mean, you can say Afghanistan was somewhat justified. Bin laden was there, we wanted to try him on our terms, not the terms the Taliban wanted, and we just went in, invaded, knocked the Taliban out, killed Bin Laden after 10 years of being there, stayed there for another 10 years in a failed nation building effort, and left. I mean, Afghanistan, in retrospect wasn't great, but Iraq was inexcusable.
The whole premise was that Saddam Hussein had WMDs and was working with Al Qaeda, and we needed to stop him before he could use his weapons. The Bush administration had fancy satellite photos of trucks that they put in front of the UN claiming were filled with WMDs, and we didn't know wtf were in those trucks. I mean, they were trucks. Anyway, we used this as the premise to launch a war in Iraq similar to Afghanistan. And it was a huge mistake. Thousands of American troops were killed, hundreds of thousands, if not millions of Iraqi civilians were killed. We destabilized the region. We wasted trillions of dollars, blowing up our national debt at the time for no good reason. And what did we get out of it? We left, and then ISIS took over the country. And the republicans wanted to stay longer. They wanted this to be a "forever war" similar to what Afghanistan turned into.
There are people in my high school class that I know who served in Iraq and now have PTSD. I have another guy I used to know from school/church who was doing physical therapy for injuries he got over there. I ran into him at the physical therapy place. I was there because I dislocated my knee in gym class. He was there because he got wounded over in Iraq. So I know people personally who paid the price for that war. And was it worth it? No. And I don't think anyone who thinks it does. Quite frankly, there's a reason many Iraq War vets now sound like fricking Graham Platner. He was another one. Did four tours over there, now left wing and disillusioned AF. We went into these countries thinking we were the good guys, the liberators. We left in shame, feeling like we did the wrong thing, and the troops still grappling with what they had to do over there.
Dick Cheney is responsible for all of this. He was the brains behind the Bush administration. Bush, much like Trump, wasn't very smart. He had people behind him do the thinking for him. And Cheney was basically the "shadow president" so to speak. And you know what? A lot of people think, given Cheney's connection to Halliburton, that we just went in for the oil. Wouldn't surprise me. There's normally realpolitik behind our foreign policy and places we take action in. We claim one motivation but it's almost always about money or natural resources. We had 3000 soldiers die for THAT? Really?
And I'm not even getting into things like the torture and denial of legal rights to certain groups of people, the PATRIOT act and other encroachments on our civil liberties for the name of national security. People are saying now that Dick Cheney pioneered the unitary executive theory that Trump is doing his stuff based on, and that what we're seeing how is the "imperial boomerang" where we're starting to see treatment of people here at home be similar to what happens abroad.
There are liberals and lefties out there who would go so far that they wanted the guy arrested for war crimes and tried in the Hague. I tended to be a bit more moderate, believing that as long as there was the pretense of good faith, that we shouldnt necessarily weaponize the justice system against our political enemies (in a way we're seeing the reasons we stuck to those norms for so long now...it just devolves into the politicization of the justice system and bad faith actors weaponizing the system against their opposition over the pettiest of things *gives the stink eye to Trump*)., but yeah, I can still see where they're coming from. Quite frankly, Dick Cheney is our generation's Henry Kissinger. Love by the neocon right but hated by virtually everyone else. Total scumbag, should've probably went to jail, didn't because preserving institutional norms was more important.
So...yeah. This isn't just young people not knowing anything. I always said theres a reason us younger people (millennials in this case) rejected conservatism. Because what good did it do us? If anything conservatism is everything wrong with the world today. And that guy's conservatism? Well, again, we're still dealing with the ripple effects of that.
Btw, even the conservative zoomers to my knowledge dont really like Dick Cheney. They are MAGA and "America first". They're isolationists and even within the GOP, the debate over Iraq seems to have settled around "it was a mistake, we never should've went in."
So yeah. That's why we don't like Dick Cheney. I know older generations still sometimes have this cold war mentality in their thinking, but us young people are disillusioned, and who is responsible for said disillusionment? Dick Cheney. Really. It sums it up. We went into these wars behind the guy thinking that we were the good guys and the liberators, only to find our that we were the occupiers and that people died for nothing. His legacy is forever tarnished, and that's why most people don't like him even today.
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