In the 15 years since the deadliest attack on the homeland in U.S. history, "no American president has done more to weaken" the nation than Barack Obama, former Vice President Dick Cheney charges.
In an opinion piece in The Wall Street Journal, co-written with daughter Liz, Cheney argues the war with Islamic terrorists "will require an effort of greater scale and commitment than anything we have seen since World War II."
"Defeating our enemies has been made significantly more difficult by the policies of Barack Obama," he writes. "No American president has done more to weaken the U.S., hobble our defenses or aid our adversaries."
Cheney charges Obama has "overseen a decline of our own military capabilities as our adversaries’ strength has grown," and "doesn’t seem to understand that the credible threat of military force gives substance and meaning to our diplomacy. "
He also hits Obama for taking "the nation off a war footing" and treating terrorism "as a law-enforcement matter" – including by ending the "enhanced interrogation program."
"It didn’t matter that the Enhanced Interrogation Program produced information that prevented attacks, saved American lives and, we now know, contributed to the capture and killing of Osama bin Laden," Cheney writes. "Mr. Obama ended the program, publicly revealed its techniques, and failed to put any effective terrorist-interrogation program in its place."
"We are no longer interrogating terrorists in part because we are no longer capturing terrorists," he adds. "Since taking office, the president has recklessly pursued his objective of closing the detention facility at Guantanamo by releasing current detainees—regardless of the likelihood they will return to the field of battle against us."
And he argues Iraq was stable when Obama took office, but "today, Iraq’s border with Syria has been erased by the most successful and dangerous terrorist organization in history."
The Cheneys also lay into Hillary Clinton.
"President Obama and Secretaries of State Hillary Clinton and John Kerry were so concerned with pleasing Iran’s ruling mullahs that they were willing to overlook the American blood on Iranian hands and decades of Iran’s activities as the world’s leading state sponsor of terror," they write.
"Every promise made to the American people about the Obama nuclear agreement has been broken," and "instead, the Obama-Clinton agreement virtually guarantees an Iranian nuclear weapon, gives them access to the latest in centrifuge technology and will likely usher in a nuclear arms race across the Middle East."
The pair warn against a "world that will be created by withdrawal and retreat—by Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton’s policies — if we don’t reverse course."
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