Who agrees with Liz Cheney?
After Kamala Harris triumphantly touted her endorsement from Dick Cheney at the first presidential debate last month, I staggered through the post-debate “Spin Room,” desperate to query Democratic campaign surrogates for their reaction to this gobsmacking development. Are we now to assume, I asked, that Kamala’s essential worldview — about which she otherwise reveals precious little — is comfortably compatible with that of Dick Cheney, the unrepentant architect of the Iraq war?
Surrogates present struggled to articulate much in the way of a coherent answer. When I pressed Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT) to elucidate what, if anything, Kamala and Dick might disagree on, the Senator groped awkwardly for examples and eventually landed on Iraq — to which I replied that Kamala did not even hold public office in 2003, and thus for all we know may well have supported the invasion. Sen. Tammy Duckworth (D-IL) also had little to offer in terms of any tangible policy distinctions between these not-so-strange “bedfellows” — all the more jarring as Duckworth had both her legs blown off in Iraq, and was speaking to me from her wheelchair.
It seemed the only tenable thing to conclude, then, was that the Harris and Cheney worldviews are in fact firmly compatible. This inference is bolstered by Kamala and her consultants evidently deciding that a winning tactic in the final weeks of the campaign is for her to parade around the swing states with Liz Cheney, wherein the two women emphasize how much they fundamentally agree on things.
Kamala is sometimes asked how her presidency would differ from that of Joe Biden, and has frequently struggled to muster any appreciable answer. Most often she retreats to substance-free invocations of her impressively unique “life experiences,” which she maintains should signal a refreshing break from the past. But on at least one occasion, she has managed to identify a more substantive departure: unlike Biden, she would pledge to appoint a Republican to her cabinet. Certainly one Republican who must be in the running is her newfound political partner Liz Cheney. Secretary of State might sound appetizing?
So the Cheney/Harris convergence is now well-established. But what of the Cheney/Trump relationship?
Republican campaigners have lately been eager to heap scorn on the Cheneys, with Trump himself asking at a Michigan rally: “Why would Muslims support Kamala when she embraces Muslim-hating Liz Cheney?” The spectacle was doubly bracing, as Trump posed the question while surrounded by local imams in full religious garb.
But notwithstanding their current feud, what exactly was Liz Cheney’s posture toward the Trump Administration’s actual policy record, back when she was serving as a member of Congress and chairwoman of the House Republican conference?
This is a history which both “sides” seem suspiciously eager to memory-hole.
Though she frames virtually everything now by reference to the events of January 6, 2021, which according to Liz Cheney is the most pivotal date in the last several millennia, a review of the record will reveal that Liz was one of Trump’s most stalwart defenders on critical foreign policy issues.
Back in the ancient times of 2020, Liz rushed to declare her passionate support for Trump’s drone-strike assassination of Iran’s top general, Qassem Soleimani. It was also in those long-forgotten days that current Trump surrogate Tulsi Gabbard was denouncing Trump for having instigated what she called a new “regime change war against Iran” — and castigating Trump’s putative “anti-war” rhetoric as a squalid “lie.” Some things change, but the unmoored shape-shifting of politicians in pursuit of power certainly stays the same.
Liz was reliably swift to offer notes of commendation for other Trump foreign policy pronouncements, most conspicuously related to Iran and Israel, around which the Trump/Cheney alliance was thoroughly unbroken. Liz loved Trump’s policy of “maximum pressure” against Iran, designed to punish and impoverish the country’s population with extreme economic sanctions, and was “honored” to attend the White House signing ceremony for the so-called “Abraham Accords,” which ratified Trump and Jared Kushner’s project of funneling US arms to various Gulf autocracies in exchange for normalizing ties with Israel.
However, there had been one point of genuine policy discontinuity between Trump and Cheney. Liz was an ardent proponent of maintaining permanent US occupation forces in Afghanistan, and sought to stifle Trump’s claimed attempts to engineer a withdrawal. In 2020, Cheney spearheaded an amendment to the yearly National Defense Authorization bill that imposed certain constraints on Trump’s ability to withdraw forces from America’s longest-ever war, requiring that if troop levels were to be reduced to 4,000 or fewer, the administration must first submit an “assessment” of the effects of such a reduction on US “counter-terrorism” operations in the region, along with other matters. It was a clear-cut attempt by Cheney and colleagues to bureaucratically impede a withdrawal.
As it turned out, Trump never executed a full withdrawal from Afghanistan. And subsequently, he debuted a brand new position for the 2024 campaign: that he was never going to withdraw at all. Trump now proudly proclaims that his retroactive intent was to keep 4,000 US troops stationed permanently in Afghanistan — exactly the benchmark Cheney once insisted on. In numerous interviews, debates, and speeches, Trump has repeated that he would have “kept” the massive Bagram Air Base, along with the extensive US troop presence and ancillary combat missions required to maintain that base. This is in direct contravention of the “Doha agreement” he and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo had nominally brokered with the Taliban in February 2020, which called for the ultimate withdrawal of “all remaining forces from Afghanistan,” including from all “remaining bases.”
Congressman Mike Waltz (R-FL), a Trump campaign surrogate being floated for a top job in the next administration, told me in an interview that “the deal was off” because the Taliban had “reneged.” Walz explained: “At the end of the day, [Trump’s] advisors came to him and said, ‘The Taliban have reneged on six out of the seven conditions in the agreement. And he said, ‘Fine, we’re leaving the base. We’re leaving our special operators. There’s 2,500 — with 6,500 NATO. And we’re leaving our CIA.’”
Whoever can be said to have “reneged” on the Pompeo-Taliban withdrawal agreement, the end result is clear: under Trump’s command, thousands of US and NATO troops would have remained indefinitely in Afghanistan, over the militant objections of local warring factions such as the Taliban, which had unequivocally vowed to expel the US by violent force. That’s nothing less than a continuation of the war — despite Trump’s apparently false assurances that he was going to end it.
Waltz also referred me to a report published by the Republican-controlled House Foreign Affairs Committee, which accuses the Biden Administration of “emboldening the Axis of Evil” — defined as Russia, China, and Iran — by withdrawing from Afghanistan, thereby resurrecting a classic Bush/Cheney trope to underscore the GOP’s indignation. Trump-endorsed Senate candidates like Tim Sheehy in Montana have similarly denounced the very idea of withdrawing from Afghanistan — not merely the manner in which it was executed by Biden.
So in an irony to end all ironies, Trump and his GOP allies have adopted a resolutely Cheney-friendly position in the 2024 campaign — obscured as it may be by the petty squabbling and January 6 histrionics. How many voters are aware that Trump and Liz Cheney are in full agreement on the supposed need to have continued the 20-year war her dad first launched?
This is why we need you Michael. Keep it up.
Smh So, according to Liz Cheney killing one Iranian officer - Soleimani - would prevent any more attacks on US troops and bases? How’s that going, Liz?