Cheney emerges to intone guttural utterances of grave importance

Don’t shoot!

Neither an immediate nor phased withdrawal would confer any protection on the United States, Cheney said. "If we pull out, they'll follow us," he said of terrorists.

"It doesn't matter where we go. This is a global conflict. We've seen them attack in London and Madrid and Casablanca and Istanbul and Mombasa and East Africa. They've been, on a global basis, involved in this conflict.

"And it will continue -- whether we complete the job or not in Iraq -- only it'll get worse. Iraq will become a safe haven for terrorists. They'll use it in order to launch attacks against our friends and allies in that part of the world."

…"No matter how you carve it -- you can call it anything you want -- but basically, it is packing it in, going home, persuading and convincing and validating the theory that the Americans don't have the stomach for this fight."

Um, yeah. They don’t.

Part of the reason is because your planning was so appallingly dire that the whole thing has become a nightmare from which there’s no evident means of extricating ourselves, but another part of it is a little thing I like to call “mismanaged expectations.” You see, when you promise that we’ll be greeted as liberators and soldiers will have sweets and flowers thrown at their feet, but the reality turns out to be that we become an indefinitely occupying force and soldiers have IEDs thrown at their ill-protected heads, people tend to get a bit testy. I’m just sayin’.

There was one bright spot of honesty in Cheney’s sit-down in The Situation Room:

Asked if it were true he's become a "dark, nefarious source in the administration," Cheney said, "I suppose sometimes people look at my demeanor and say, 'Well, he's the Darth Vader of the administration.' "

He’s not, like, bragging about it or anything, but yeah—it’s true. He’s kinda like a dark lord who can strangle people to death with his mind and shit.

You wanna make something of it?