Ayoon wa Azan (“Blood Drips from his Teeth”)

I once urged that Dick Cheney, the former US vice president, be tried as a war criminal after he and his cabal of extremists trumped up the reasons for a war against Iraq and brought the country down over the heads of its people, killing one million Iraqis (and the killing continues today).

It is not that I am an Arab who is calling for the trial of an enemy of the Arabs and Muslims. There are a thousand similar requests to try Cheney, from purely western sources, and for the same reason, namely that he is a war criminal for whom there is sufficient evidence to find guilty in court.

Today, I will return to the demand to try Dick Cheney before the International War Crimes Tribunal in The Hague. What he committed in Iraq for eight years, along with the idiot George Bush, is sufficient. Even more, Cheney has wanted the Obama administration to continue the string of wars in Muslim countries; he accused President Obama of behind hesitant and weak because he has yet to declare his decision on whether to increase US troop levels in Afghanistan, as his commanders want.

The Obama administration is divided over a troop increase. There is a civilian majority - headed by Vice President Joe Biden - that is against boosting the number of troops. There is a majority view, but not a consensus, within the military that 40,000 additional troops are needed. The president has formed a committee to study the matter and advise him on taking the proper decision.

This stance has not pleased the war cabal. This is why Dick Cheney, who avoided military service in Vietnam, has opened a battlefront against President Obama. If it is characterized by anything, this campaign has been completely shameless, since the Bush-Cheney administration did not end the war it began in Afghanistan, and was justified after the terror of 11 September 2001. Instead, the previous administration allowed bin Laden and other terrorists from al-Qaida to survive, and turned to Iraq, after falsifying or exaggerated intelligence information, or silencing critics of the policy.

The result was that the Taliban have now become stronger than they were before; they are now threatening the regimes in Kabul and Islamabad. Al-Qaida has survived, and produced “al-Qaidas” and the occupation of Iraq has become a recruitment office for people seeking death in suicide operations, to take revenge against an enemy who kills Muslims.

The result has also been that the United States entered two wars that are now longer than the country’s participation in both world wars. The Bush administration bankrupted the riches country in the world and left its successor with a budget deficit of trillions of dollars, and an ongoing global financial crisis. Then Obama is accused of not succeeding in treating the crisis, after being in office for only nine months. They were in office for eight years, during which American lost its reputation as the leading human rights country, with wars and money.

While Cheney was attacking Obama over a war that the former lost, his daughter Liz was establishing, along with the Likudnik William Kristol, another nest of neoconservatives, called “Keep America Safe.”

I think the neoconservatives hope for more terror in America, like the 11 September attacks, to justify their earlier and subsequent crimes, and escape prosecution. I also think that they want the financial crisis to continue and America and the world to be ruined, so that Barack Obama can be held responsible for a crisis they triggered themselves.

William Kristol is an extremist who established, along with other Likudniks, the Project for the American Century, in order to dominate the world. The group sent a letter to Bill Clinton, urging him to overthrow Saddam Hussein. Clinton did not accept, because he is smart. Then came the idiot George Bush and the war cabal ruled behind the scenes; the result was a string of catastrophes. Certainly, Kristol continues to seek destruction, through his publication The Weekly Standard, the mouthpiece of the neoconservatives and a new rightwing think tank, the Foreign Policy Initiative.

The Likudnik war cabal is working for Israel at the expense of American interests. Meanwhile, Liz Cheney is trying to salvage her father’s reputation and perhaps prevent him from going on trial in the end, but her participation with Kristol in his project negates any credibility they might have together.

I find it objectionable, or racist, that the prevailing accusation against Cheney since he left office is that he tortured prisoners at Guantanamo or elsewhere, and not that he killed one million Iraqis. The reason is that torturing prisoners is against American law, and it seems that some consider the violation of US law more important than the lives of one million Iraqis. They are Muslims, so they can be killed with impunity.

Finally, I hope that readers believe me when I say that what I am writing about Cheney is much less than what American politicians are saying. I will just mention Representative Alan Grayson, a Democrat from Florida, who said about the former vice president: “I have trouble listening to what he says sometimes because of the blood that drips from his teeth when he’s talking.” In other words, like Dracula.