(ATTYTOOD) Peace with "honor": Cheney channels Nixon, and the history of a disastrous promise

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http://www.attytood.com/2007/02/peace_with_honor_cheney_channe.html

Peace with "honor": Cheney channels Nixon, and the history of a disastrous promise

And I pledge to you tonight that the first priority foreign policy objective of our next Administration will be to bring an honorable end to the war in Vietnam. We shall not stop there. We need a policy to prevent more Vietnams.

-- Richard Nixon, accepting the Republican presidential nomination, Aug. 7, 1968.

They say that in Nixon's final days in the White House in 1974, the disgraced soon-to-be-ex-president roamed the hallways, talking to portraits of dead presidents. Frankly, you have to wonder if Dick Cheney is having an animated conversation with Nixon's portrait these days.

Cheney's long strange trip through American politics pretty much began in the Nixon White House in the early 1970s, and much of his public life seems like a crusade to avenge his misunderstood ex-boss. At the height of Watergate, he told friends it wasn't a scandal but "a power struggle," and as top aide to Nixon's successor Gerald Ford, he chafed so much at the post-Watergate restrictions on White House power that he honed his bizarre theory of an all-powerful unitary executive.

Those aren't the lessons that most Americans took away from the Nixon years, and yet they are shaping our nation's government some 33 years later. Even so, we never expected Cheney to look to Nixon for inspiration on handling the fiasco that is Iraq. Until now. Check out the echoes of 1968 in what Cheney said earlier this week on his Asia junket:

"And I want you to know that the American people will not support a policy of retreat," he added. "We want to complete the mission, we want to get it done right, and we want to return with honor," said Cheney, who heads on Thursday for Australia to meet Prime Minister John Howard, another backer of Bush's Iraq policy.