NEW YORK: The war of words between Republican hawks who took US to war against Iraq in 2003 and the Democrats who opposed it, has been brewing since Sunni Islamic militants captured Mosul last week and began eyeing Baghdad.

However, accusations and the bitterness came to a head on Wednesday when former vice president Dick Cheney and his daughter Liz, the former deputy assistant secretary for near eastern affairs, authored a scathing op-ed in the Wall Street Journal that defined the Obama doctrine as “empty threats, meaningless red lines, leading from behind, appeasing our enemies, abandoning our allies or apologizing for our great nation”.

Rubbing salt in the wounds, they accused the president of emboldening the extremist Islamic State of Iraq and Al Sham (ISIS) and being “willfully blind to the impact of his policies”.

“Rarely has a US president been so wrong about so much at the expense of so many,” the pair write.

“Despite clear evidence of the dire need for American leadership around the world, the desperation of our allies and the glee of our enemies, President Obama seems determined to leave office ensuring he has taken America down a notch. Indeed, the speed of the terrorists’ takeover of territory in Iraq has been matched only by the speed of American decline on his watch.”

But their assessment did not sit well with Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, a Democrat and a a staunch opponent of the war in Iraq who now wants to see America stay out of what he believes is a civil war.

“If there is one thing that this country does not need, it’s that we should be taking advice from Dick Cheney on wars. Being on the wrong side of Dick Cheney is to be on the right side of history,” Reid said.

Democrats point out that the situation in Iraq is the direct consequence of the Bush/Cheney administration which took American to war along with Britain without actually finding the alleged “weapons of masa, destructions”. And as a result of the flawed vision thousands of Americans were killed, besides millions of Iraqis.

But the US Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, Re­pub­lican of Kentucky, said the current violence was the “entirely predictable” consequence of the president’s failure to leave troops in Iraq after 2011 (the Iraqis rejected US conditions for an agreement to do so).

“They have preferred that our soldiers stayed in Iraq in harm’s way? Is he, are they, the Republicans, willing to risk more American lives?” Reid asked.

But this is just the beginning, as US mid-term elections scheduled for November loom large and Republicans plan to take over the US Senate away from the hands of Democrats.

Published in Dawn, June 19th, 2014