A “couple”:http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/week_2007_05_27.php#014334 of “people”:http://matthewyglesias.theatlantic.com/archives/2007/05/cheney_on_geneva.php have commented on “these remarks”:http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2007/05/20070526-1.html, delivered by Dick Cheney to the graduating class at West Point. The piece is full of the usual doubletalk: “We’re fighting a war on terror because the enemy attacked us first, and hit us hard”, etc. Notice he didn’t _quite_ say, “We’re fighting a war in _Iraq_ because the enemy attacked us first,” but this is clearly what he means, because later on he says,
bq. The terrorists … [seek] to establish a totalitarian empire, a caliphate, with Baghdad as its capital. They view the world as a battlefield and they yearn to hit us again. And now they have chosen to make Iraq the central front in their war against civilization.
Nice choice, guys. The bit that’s gotten notice is this:
bq. As Army officers on duty in the war on terror, you will now face enemies who oppose and despise everything you know to be right, every notion of upright conduct and character, and every belief you consider worth fighting for and living for. Capture one of these killers, and he’ll be quick to demand the protections of the Geneva Convention and the Constitution of the United States. Yet when they wage attacks or take captives, their delicate sensibilities seem to fall away.
Yeah, you see, that sort of double standard is what makes them the bad guys. Josh Marshall Steve Benen asks whether it “is it too much to ask the Vice President to refer to the protections of the Geneva Convention and the Constitution of the United States as _good_ things? Perhaps protections that he’s proud of?”
The thing about Cheney’s rhetoric, though, is that the flow from the first to the second sentence strongly implies that he _does_ think of them as good things. From what he says, it’s clear that the U.S. constitution and Geneva Conventions are amongst those things the graduates “know to be right,” that and that they embody ideals of “upright conduct” and express those beliefs they “consider worth fighting for and living for.” It’s just that he doesn’t seem to have any notion that these ideals themselves express rules for how to defend one’s principles without betraying them.