President Barack Obama is to blame for the rise of the Islamic State terror group (ISIS), says former Vice President Dick Cheney.
In an interview taped on Monday by CNN that is set to air in full on Tuesday, Cheney was told by interviewer Jamie Gangel that
Obama has blamed President George W. Bush and him for setting up the circumstances that made ISIS possible.
"Well, I think he's wrong," Cheney said. "We had a situation in which by the time we got through the Surge in '07 and '08, President Bush made a courageous decision and correct decision that Iraq was in good shape when we left office."
"Barack Obama said as much. What happened basically was they failed to follow through," Cheney told CNN in a segment aired Monday on
"The Lead with Jake Tapper" which included his daughter Liz Cheney. "They withdrew as quickly as possible and left no stay behind force there. They created a vacuum, and the vacuum was filled by ISIS."
The Cheneys coauthored the book,
"Exceptional: Why the World Needs a More Powerful America," will be released on Tuesday, and they also appeared Monday on the
Rush Limbaugh radio show.
A strong America with a bipartisan foreign policy is vital not only for the nation, but the world, they told Limbaugh.
"It's just tragic that this progressive idea that somehow America's footprint has been too large in the world and that the role that we played has been a negative," Liz Cheney, former principal deputy assistant secretary of state, said.
The United States has been a greater force for good than any other nation in the history of mankind and has been responsible for the liberation of more people than any other nation in history, Liz Cheney said. But the liberal, progressive agenda seeks to diminish the country, she said.
In the book, the Cheneys lay out the history of bipartisan foreign policy, beginning with President Franklin D. Roosevelt in World War II. That policy remained in effect through Democratic and Republican presidents up until President Barack Obama, they said.
After detailing what Obama has done to turn things in a negative direction, the authors then lay out what the next president will have to do to reverse course and get America back where it was.
The book marks a continuation of Dick Cheney's public criticism of the current Oval Office occupant. Cheney admitted there has been a code of former presidents and vice presidents not being critical of the current president, but added that Obama's actions, such as prosecuting people for carrying out the George W. Bush administration's counterterrorism policies, have caused him to break the code.
"As you look at the track record of this administration, it's not just that it differed from or was contrary to the policies we put in place during the Bush-Cheney administration. It's that it was a decided break with 70 or 75 years of American history," he said. "Democrats like Harry Truman and FDR and John F. Kennedy would never recognize the policies that Obama has pursued from the standpoint of national security. They believed in a strong national defense."
Though he might not have agreed with them from a partisan standpoint, they were effective in using and maintaining U.S. military force," Cheney said. "This president doesn't recognize or seem to be part of that tradition at all."
The Iran nuclear deal, should have been treated as a treaty, Dick Cheney said, adding that, if it had, it never would have been ratified by Congress. Liz Cheney said the deal clearly is a fulfillment of Obama's Cairo speech from 2009, in which he said, no nation has the right to decide which other nations have nuclear weapons.
Obama "seems not to recognize the difference between a nuclear weapon in the hands of the United States, for example, and a nuclear weapon in the hands of Iran," Liz Cheney said.
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