Cheney Wants To Send U.S. Troops Back To Iraq. Will That Be The GOP Message? Will It Be Hillary's In 2016?

A new CBSNews/NYTimes poll was released yesterday showing that 50% of Americans say the U.S. has no responsibility to act on violence in Iraq. Even 42% of Republicans think it's not our responsibility. But that hasn't translated to Members of Congress, 250 of whom voted last Thursday against Barbara Lee's amendment to require that no funds in next year's Department of Defense appropriations bill go towards combat operations in Iraq. 142 Democrats and just 23 Republicans voted for peace. 44 Democrats-- lead for Military Industrial Complex trolls Steny Hoyer, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, Steve Israel and Eliot Engel-- joined 206 Republicans who want more more in Iraq, regardless of what they own constituents want. Alan Grayson started a simple, straight-forward 2-sentence petition to President Obama:

U.S. military action in Iraq: It sure didn’t work out well last time. Let’s not make that mistake again.

U.S. "training" in and arms aid to Iraq, which cost American taxpayers billions of dollars and made part of the conservative donor base immensely more wealthy, was a colossal waste of resources, that-- in a more just world-- should land policy makers, starting with Dick Cheney, in front of a firing squad. Instead of contemplating what it's like to feel a hail of bullets rip through his flesh, Cheney is all over the mass media calling President Obama a traitor and picking fights with Rand Paul for trying to stop the madness.

10 years and a month ago, Anthony Zinni, retired head if the U.S. Central Command, in charge of all American troops in the Middle East, broke with the Cheneyites over Iraq, saying "There has been poor strategic thinking in this. There has been poor operational planning and execution on the ground. And to think that we are going to 'stay the course,' the course is headed over Niagara Falls. I think it's time to change course a little bit, or at least hold somebody responsible for putting you on this course. Because it's been a failure."

In the book, Zinni writes: "In the lead up to the Iraq war and its later conduct, I saw at a minimum, true dereliction, negligence and irresponsibility, at worse, lying, incompetence and corruption."

"I think there was dereliction in insufficient forces being put on the ground and fully understanding the military dimensions of the plan. I think there was dereliction in lack of planning," says Zinni. "The president is owed the finest strategic thinking. He is owed the finest operational planning. He is owed the finest tactical execution on the ground. … He got the latter. He didn't get the first two."

Zinni says Iraq was the wrong war at the wrong time-- with the wrong strategy. And he was saying it before the U.S. invasion. In the months leading up to the war, while still Middle East envoy, Zinni carried the message to Congress: "This is, in my view, the worst time to take this on. And I don't feel it needs to be done now."

But he wasn't the only former military leader with doubts about the invasion of Iraq. Former General and National Security Advisor Brent Scowcroft, former Centcom Commander Norman Schwarzkopf, former NATO Commander Wesley Clark, and former Army Chief of Staff Eric Shinseki all voiced their reservations.

…[Bremer] has made mistake after mistake after mistake."

What mistakes?

"Disbanding the army," says Zinni. "De-Baathifying, down to a level where we removed people that were competent and didn't have blood on their hands that you needed in the aftermath of reconstruction-- alienating certain elements of that society."

Zinni says he blames the Pentagon for what happened. "I blame the civilian leadership of the Pentagon directly. Because if they were given the responsibility, and if this was their war, and by everything that I understand, they promoted it and pushed it-- certain elements in there certainly-- even to the point of creating their own intelligence to match their needs, then they should bear the responsibility," he says.

"But regardless of whose responsibility I think it is, somebody has screwed up. And at this level and at this stage, it should be evident to everybody that they've screwed up. And whose heads are rolling on this? That's what bothers me most."

Adds Zinni: "If you charge me with the responsibility of taking this nation to war, if you charge me with implementing that policy with creating the strategy which convinces me to go to war, and I fail you, then I ought to go."

On Sunday, Paul told CNN viewers that "there needs to be a full-throated debate in Congress, and Congress has to decide. Militarily, we could go back in. The surge worked. Obviously, we have the military might and power. But the country as a whole has to decide, do we want to send 100,000 troops in? Are we willing to have 4,500 young Americans die to save a city like Mosul that the Shiites won't even save, that they have fled?… We went into Libya and we got rid of that terrible Qaddafi, now it's a jihadist wonderland over there. There's jihadists everywhere. If we were to get rid of Assad it would be a jihadist wonderland in Syria. It's now a jihadist wonderland in Iraq, precisely because we got over-involved." Infuriated, Cheney started hissing all over the Beltway that Paul is "an isolationist." Although I didn't hear any hissing directed towards Saudi Prince Bandar bin Sultan (AKA, "Bandar Bush"), who is bankrolling ISIS and, along with the U.S., terrorists in Syria as well. And now Cheney is screeching that the U.S. must send troops back to Iraq.

This dichotomy between Rand Paul and Dick Cheney leaves the Republican Party in a quandary as we approach the 2016 presidential elections. Imagine Hillary-- a stubborn and unrehabilitated warmonger-- as the Democratic nominee. Will the Republicans run a me-too warmonger from the Cheney wing of the party, like Ted Cruz (or almost anyone else) or will they turn to the "isolationist" who went on Meet the Press Sunday and said "I don’t blame on President Obama. Has he really got the solution? Maybe there is no solution. But I do blame the Iraq war on the chaos that is in the Middle East."

As Sam Stein reported at HuffPo, another of the GOP warmonger's from the Cheney wing, Rick Santorum sought to denigrate Paul and put his views beyond the pale, offering what he termed a message "to the Rand Paul types" inside the GOP.

"You can see what happens when America creates a vacuum," Santorum said. "Other people fill it, and it is not to our security interests."

…Michael Goldfarb, founder of the unapologetically hawkish Free Beacon, distilled Paul’s message on foreign policy into a simple: “Don’t blame Obama.” After tweeting his disdain, he elaborated in an email to the Huffington Post.

"The hawks in the party well know the dangers of supporting Obama policies out of principle-- the Afghan surge, NSA surveillance, strikes against Assad, all Obama policies that we supported because they were the right thing to do," Goldfarb wrote. "In each case we saw the Republican base recoil at the administration's incompetence and mismanagement. Now Rand, who shares Obama's view of the limits of American power, is supporting Obama's policy of doing nothing in Iraq and Syria. Good luck with that!"

These are not uncharted waters for Paul, who has been unapologetic in his position that U.S. interventions overseas have caused as many (if not more) problems than they’ve solved. His father campaigned on a similar doctrine during his last two presidential runs and earned a healthy following among war-weary conservatives in the process.

The younger Paul has been careful to assure his fellow party members that he’s no isolationist. And in his own speech at the Faith and Freedom Conference, he made sure to assure the crowd that "if attacked, it is our duty to defend your family, to defend your country, or defend our freedom."

But Paul also spent much of Friday making the case that the Iraq war was a mistake and that similar enterprises needed to be avoided in the future. There is, he said in his speech, "a misguided belief that we should project strength through war."

"During the Iraq war, think about what happened," he said. "A quarter of a million Iraqi Christians fled Iraq. They feared the Shiite government that is there now that we helped put in place after Saddam. They fled in droves by the hundreds of thousands."

I wonder how many Republicans would vote for a hawkish Hillary Clinton instead of amore dovish Paul-- and how many Democrats would do just the opposite. And what about in congressional races? Will it make a difference in South Dakota, for example, where Democratic underdog Rick Weiland came out in full-throated opposition to the war, while he Republican opponent, Mike Rounds, is just another run-of-the-mill right-wing hawk? Or in Maine, where Shenna Bellows is the anti-Military Industrial Establishment candidate and her Republican opponent, Susan Collins, is the poster child for the same Military Industrial Complex that Republican President Dwight Eisenhower warned us about?