Dick Cheney is a liar. A lousy one. He is again threatening that "al Qaeda in Iraq" (which he would have you believe is interchangeable with the "al Qaeda in Waziristan" he let escape in 2001) will take over the fertile crescent if U.S. forces withdraw. In this version, they will make so much money from control over the oil that they will somehow be a threat to us or something…

Well, last summer when Rudy Giuliani tried to pretend that al Qaeda was motivated to attack the United States due to freedom for women and to paint Rep. Ron Paul M.D. as some sort of terrorist sympathizer for stating the plain truth in the War Party’s house about Osama’s tactic of provoking a full scale invasion of Afghanistan (Iraq was a bonus) in order to bleed our empire dry and force our combat troops off of what they consider to be holy land, the Arabian peninsula - and out of the Muslim world at large - I decided to see what the experts had to say.

I came up with Ron Paul’s Reading List for the Farsighted: Interviews for Antiwar Radio with Robert A. Pape, Michael Scheuer, Chalmers Johnson, Philip Giraldi and Ray McGovern. They said Ron Paul was right and that Rudy Giuliani was ridiculous.

In particular, they addressed the fact that Osama bin Laden has every reason to be pleased that the U.S. occupies Iraq and that "al Qaeda in Iraq" (which did not exist until more than a year and a half after the invasion) was only tolerated to the degree they were while helping to fight the occupation.

(Now that the U.S. has temporarily bribed the "Sunni insurgency," whom they’ve renamed the "Concerned Local Citizens" or "Sons of Iraq," to stop fighting Americans and instead help fight al Qaeda, they have actually put many of the al Qaeda men on the payroll as well, according to Patrick Cockburn who told me that he saw this with his own eyes.)

Anyway, last May I asked Philip Giraldi, a former counter-terrorism officer in the CIA and columnist for Antiwar.com, whether the War Party was right in pointing to a threat of an al Qaeda takeover of Iraq in the event of U.S. withdrawal, he answered:

"No. I think the reality is that if the United States leaves it will be a very bad thing for al Qaeda because the Sunnis don't particularly want them around and would get rid of them.

"There have already been reports that the Sunnis are already kind of tired of them because when they stage a major provocation or attack, it's the local Sunni population that has to take the grief when the U.S. Army descends. … It's a marriage of convenience with al Qaeda insofar as it's a marriage at all. So I think it would be fallacious to assume - In fact, let me [say it] stronger than that: I think it would be ridiculous to assume that al Qaeda could establish some kind of serious presence in Iraq similar to what it did in Afghanistan because the dynamic is completely different."

If Dick Cheney’s militia can’t take over the place, how are we supposed to believe that a ragtag group of Egyptians, Lybians and Saudis can?

(I first debunked this nonsense on Antiwar.com back in 2005.)

Thanks to Anders, A UK blogger and Stress regular, who created this short Youtube to help drive the point home.

(Cross-posted at Antiwar.com)