Tom Cotton. The son Dick Cheney never had.
by digby
My piece at Salon today discusses the disturbing news that Dick Cheney's ghost is walking the halls of congress in the guise of Tom Cotton --- and Dick himself is back on the road pimping his new book --- and war, of course.
Move over Lindsey Graham and John McCain, there’s a new bellicose sheriff in town. He may be just 38 years old and his only prior jobs of note might have been as a low-level officer in the military and a one term congressman; but now that he’s been in the US Senate for three months, Tom Cotton evidently sees himself as a geopolitical and military genius, the GOPs new leader on national security.
Cotton appeared on a conservative radio show this week to assure Republicans that a hypothetical war with Iran would be a cakewalk:
COTTON: Even if military action were required – and we certainly should have kept the credible threat of military force on the table, it always improves diplomacy – the president is trying to make you think it would be 150,000 heavy mechanized troops on the ground in the Middle East again as we saw in Iraq. That’s simply not the case.
It would be something more along the lines of what President Clinton did in December 1998 during Operation Desert Fox. Several days of air and naval bombing against Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction facilities for exactly the same kind of behavior, for interfering with weapons inspectors and for disobeying Security Council resolutions. All we’re asking is that the president simply be as tough in the protection of America’s national security interests as Bill Clinton was.
As my colleague Simon Maloy observed yesterday, Cotton obviously believes he is being especially clever by evoking Bill Clinton as an allegedly “tough” protector of America’s national security interest with his allusion to Operation Desert Fox back in 1998, but in fact the history shows that Clinton’s action was seen by Republicans at the time as a cowardly case of wagging the dog. (In his defense Cotton was still a teenager and was undoubtedly more interested in the lurid details of the Starr Report which was in all the headlines at the time.)
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