Some of us Have Short Memories

 

Ah, the selective amnesia of the American political memory—where yesterday’s architects of war become today’s elder statesmen, and the cost of blood is buried beneath the shifting sands of narrative control. Rewind to 1991: Then–Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney was a voice of restraint, cautioning President George H. W. Bush against marching to Baghdad after liberating Kuwait. His reasoning? Toppling Saddam Hussein would destabilize the region, embroil the U.S. in a prolonged occupation, and cost untold American lives. Cheney’s own words from that era are chillingly prescient: “It’s not worth it,” he said. “It’s a quagmire.”

Fast forward to 2003, and that same man—now Vice President—was the chief evangelist for regime change. Armed with shaky and fabricated intelligence and a post-9/11 appetite for vengeance, Cheney helped steer George W. Bush into a war that would do precisely what he once warned against. The irony is not just historical—it’s tragic. Over 4,400 American service members dead, tens of thousands wounded, and a generation of veterans carrying the physical and psychological scars of a war sold on the premise of weapons that didn’t exist.

And yet, here we are. Cheney’s role in that pivot—from caution to crusade—is rarely invoked in mainstream retrospectives. .The media moved on. The public, exhausted by the war’s duration and ambiguity, let the narrative fade. Cheney himself, never one for public remorse, has been recast in some circles as a grizzled sage of national security, his legacy burnished by time and the short attention span of the electorate. Today’s paper carries a large, and largely laudatory, spread of what amounts almost to a eulogy.

It’s not just about Cheney, of course. It’s about how we metabolize history. How we allow complexity to be flattened, culpability to be diluted, and consequences to be abstracted. The Iraq War wasn’t a bipartisan misstep—it was a calculated gamble by a small cadre of powerful men, with Cheney at the helm and a naïve POTUS at his bidding, and the cost measured not just in lives, but in trust, credibility, and the moral authority of a nation that once claimed to liberate, not occupy.

So yes, we’ve forgotten. Or perhaps we’ve chosen to forget. Because remembering demands reckoning—and reckoning is rarely convenient or satisfying. If speaking the truth about the dead is speaking ill of the dead, then the truth is simply the truth. Sorry, not sorry!