Former Vice President Dick Cheney and his daughter Liz Cheney appeared on The Kelly File Wednesday to discuss their new organization, The Alliance for a Strong America, which is "dedicated to the hard but necessary task of preserving freedom and restoring American strength and power in the wake of the Obama administration’s national security failures."
"He has not been willing to step forward and have the United States play a significant role in the world," Vice President Cheney said of Obama.
He also ripped Obama for being overly committed to pulling all American troops out of Iraq, which now faces a national crisis with the terrorist organization ISIL threatening to topple the entire country. Cheney argued that rather than negotiating a stay-behind agreement, Obama and the Iraqis never came to a Status of Forces Agreement because he didn't push hard enough. That, Cheney said, has precipitated the current crisis.
"Our generals had recommended a level of 20,000 to stay behind," Cheney said. "The White House said no and cut it ultimately to 3,000 and frankly, that was inadequate to do the job. Oo agreement was ever reached, but the result was an Iraqi military that was unable to stand up to the terrorists when when ISIS came in from Syria a few days ago."
Cheney also defended the Bush administration's Iraq policy against tough questioning by Kelly, telling her he flatly disagreed with assessments that it was wrong to take down Saddam Hussein.
Kelly asked whether they considered Obama "dangerous," and Liz Cheney replied in the affirmative.
"I think that he is unique in terms of a president who is sitting in the Oval Office who has made very clear that his desire is to weaken the nation," she said. "And whether you say it's his intent, whether it's naiveté, you can now look at the results of the policy the last six-and-a-half years, and you've got the black-clad terrorists of ISIS now taking over city after city after city in Iraq."