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| Cheney is more responsible for November 13th Paris Attacks than Saddam Hussein was for September 11th Attacks |
Back in 2003, the Bush administration was biting at the bit to invade Iraq, even repeatedly conflating Iraq with the September 11th attacks. This push to invade the Baathist dictatorship that up until their invasion into Kuwait, the US counted as one of its regional allies, was spearheaded by the individuals that called themselves Project for a New American Century (PNAC) in 1997 which called for wholesale regime change in places that had significant energy resources. That wasn't explicitly stated but the countries that were targeted all had proven petroleum reserves or natural gas deposits, so not too far fetched of me to extrapolate that conclusion. It was however explicitly stated that the New American Century would come at the barrel of a gun and not some 'mamby-pamby' diplomacy, the priority of the military would become the ultimate view for American foreign affairs according to PNAC
Anyhow, PNAC members included Paul Wolfowitz, Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Donald Rumsfeld, Elliott Abrams, Bill Bennett, Jeb Bush, and future Vice President and heavy of the Bush administration Dick Cheney. To go over the laundry list of things that lead up the catastrophe that was the Iraq invasion and subsequent occupation is tedious, so I will forgo that and presume that you know that Dick Cheney had considerable influence in pushing for the invasion of Iraq and regime change there. A lot of the persuasive arguments made by the administration was tying the Hussein regime with the 9/11 terrorist attacks from such questionable sources as informant "Curveball" who provided information about Iraqi weapons program under duress of a mock execution, and after the fact was revealed to be whole cloth lies that were known to be lies by both the US and UK governments. One of the governments advocating against invading Iraq was the French, whose Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin said "we believe that military intervention would be the worst solution" and he was right it turned out. The French also refused to allow UK and US to use French airspace to their airforces for the invasion, which received derision by the "Freedom Fries" crowd and those conservatives that poured out French wine to demonstrate how much they disagree with the French.
Then the Iraq invasion happened, the Baathist party members were removed from the military (which was nearly all officers and plenty of enlisted), the civil government was in disarray as Shia and Sunni started taking revenge on each other and the Kurds sought out as much autonomy and independence as they could squeeze out of the government in Baghdad and allowed by the US military setting up a long term occupation. After eight years of war, insurrection, indiscriminate violence, and massive loss of lives mostly by Iraqi civilians, the Sunni insurgency became well trained and nearly professional but due to the demographics could not hold much territory in the Shia dominated region. The Iraqi army, and national police were defenders of the nation only by name, when de facto they were quite parochial in their responsibilities. When the US formally departed in the fall of 2011, the Iraq Civil War had gotten into full swing. From the Iraq Civil War and the Arab Spring Uprising in neighboring Syria ISIS/ISIL/Daesh arose, and it would be difficult to say that the Iraq Civil War would have occurred without the American invasion and occupation thereby the offshoot of ISIS would never have been born without the American invasion. Without Dick Cheney and other PNAC members pushing for a military invasion of Iraq, there would have been no ISIS attack on Paris this past weekend.
I admit that this an indirect path of responsibility, but Cheney is far more culpable of the Paris terrorist attacks than Saddam Hussein who had no foreknowledge nor any connection with al Queda before or after September 11th of the 9/11 terrorist attacks.
