Meanwhile, Dick Cheney, addressing soldiers he and the neocons expect to sacrifice their lives (or limbs or health due to the ruinous effects of depleted uranium), said “the US must be prepared to fight the war on terror for decades,” reports the BBC. “Like other great duties in history, it will require decades of patient effort, and it will be resisted by those whose only hope for power is through the spread of violence,” Cheney said. ‘’As the people of that region experience new hope, progress, and control over their own destiny, we will see the power of freedom to change our world, and a terrible threat will be removed.” Of course, when Cheney was asked during the Vietnam War to answer the call of “great duties,” he had “other priorities,” allowing people of lesser resources and class (unable to secure college deferments or, as his boss did, cushy positions in the Texas Air National Guard) to fight and die.

As well, when Cheney tells us we “must be prepared to fight the war on terror for decades,” what he really means is we must surrender our civil liberties, consent to 24/7 surveillance, national ID cards, subdermal chips, and other pervasive aspects of the corporate-plutocratic Panopticon conveying a “sentiment of an invisible omniscience” in true Orwellian fashion. Cheney also means the American people must prepare themselves for endless and ever increasingly brutal violence, both abroad where “vassals” resist Cheney’s version of neocon-neoliberalism and at home where law enforcement officers are transformed into paramilitary goons, trained and commanded to confiscate guns and either “evacuate” citizens to concentration camps or quarantine their neighborhoods as ill-defined (or government concocted) diseases spread (or do not spread, except by way of corporate media hype)

“Osama bin Laden’s al Qaeda network and other terrorist groups ‘were actually at war with this country before 2001,’ Cheney told attendees at the Association of the United States Army’s annual meeting and exposition,” NewsMax reports. “In 1983, an explosives-laden truck killed 241 U.S. Marines in Beirut, Lebanon, Cheney recalled. Afterward, U.S. troops were withdrawn from Beirut, he said…. And ‘time and time again, for the remainder of the 20th century, the terrorists hit America and America did not hit back hard enough,’ Cheney said. In 1993, terrorists bombed the World Trade Center in New York City, he noted. During the same year, he recalled, extremists in Mogadishu, Somalia, ambushed and killed 18 American soldiers.”

Cheney does bother to mention the historical fact that Lebanon was in the middle of a civil war at the time, exacerbated by an Israeli invasion as the IDF chased and killed Palestinians who had the temerity to resist occupation and decades of humiliation, and Reagan sent troops as a “stabilizing factor,” but actually sent to support Lebanese President Amin Gemayel (of the Kataeb Party, that is to say the Phalange, a fascist organization), resulting in Reagan being forced to pull out U.S. troops after a suicide bomber killed 241 Marines in response to U.S. warships indiscriminately shelling Druze civilians in response to the earlier bombing of the U.S. embassy by Muslims outraged over U.S. support for the fascist Phalange and the Israelis. Cheney of course would have his cardboard cut-out president “stay the course” in Lebanon, with predictable results—more dead civilians, more animosity directed against the United States, and more soldiers sent home with missing arms, legs, and insurmountable mental problems. According to Bush’s brain, the problem is “America did not hit back hard enough,” probably meaning the U.S. didn’t nuke Lebanon.

As well, Cheney neglects to mention that when Somalis “ambushed and killed 18 American soldiers” in their own country, U.S. troops indiscriminately fired on crowds of Somalis in Mogadishu, killing more than 1,000, at least five times the officially reported number. “In a dramatic new account of the battle in central Mogadishu, collated from hours of interviews with American and Somali survivors, Mark Bowden of the Philadelphia Inquirer has revealed that U.S. troops abandoned their rules of engagement—to fire only when threatened by fire—and shot down every Somali they saw, including women and children,” Richard Dowden reported for the Observer. “According to Bowden’s account, U.S. troops took hostages and murdered wounded Somalis and a prisoner. They also used the bodies of Somalis as barricades. Bowden also reveals that, far from the official version of the mission (that it was not intended to kill anyone) helicopter gunships began the ill-fated raid by firing anti-tank missiles into houses.” Black Hawk Down, indeed.

Of course, as we now know, massacring civilians is the standard modus operandi in Iraq. Again, if we are to believe Cheney, such indiscriminate and horrific violence is not good enough and the U.S. needs to “hit back” at civilians with even more determination and less discrimination.

But what our cardboard cut-out president and his brain, Dick the Destroyer, are not telling us is that “we” are losing the “war” in Iraq and Dubya and Dick’s spate of speeches are simply exercises in transparent propaganda. Charley Reese, writing for antiwar.com, puts it into perspective:

The so-called war against terrorism is unwinnable. It was designed to be unwinnable so that it can be carried on for an indefinite duration and thus support the vast military-industrial-anti-terrorism complex. The end of the Cold War scared this complex half to death. It can only survive with an enemy at the gates…. The president and his band of pro-Israel neoconservatives grossly misled the American people into a war that, even were we to win it (and we won’t), will not benefit the American people one iota. It’s good to see that more and more Americans are catching on to the fact that our government was not honest with us.

However, it remains to be seen if the American people care in sufficient numbers if they were lied to, let alone put an end to the insanity of the neocon plan for generational shock and awe (now promised to have a nuclear dimension), invasion, and occupation. For, with each passing day, the government, under the control of the warmongering neocon death heads, consolidate power, minimize the opposition, trash the Constitution, and erect an all-encompassing police state with its intrusive high-tech Panopticon of surveillance and subversion.