The House Republican conference on Tuesday welcomed former Vice President Dick Cheney for a visit and embraced his call for action against ISIS in Iraq.
Cheney, who pushed for the U.S. to invade Iraq in 2003, told the GOP members that it’s time to go back into Iraq to mitigate the threat posed by ISIS, according to a Huffington Post report.
And although many have concluded that Cheney was wrong to urge American intervention in Iraq, Republicans on Tuesday seemed to agree with Cheney’s calls to combat ISIS militarily.
According to the Huffington Post, Rep. Peter King (R-NY) said that for a year President Obama has said that “we’re going to bring all the troops home, and that we’re going to basically be out of Iraq and Afghanistan.” But Cheney said it’s time to reverse course.
“Now the president’s basically saying, one way or the other, we’re going back into Iraq. Dick Cheney was here to support that,” King said.
And when pressed about whether it was misguided to take advice on Iraq from Cheney, King said he didn’t think so.
“No, because most of us think we did the right thing in Iraq,” he said.
Cheney also criticized Obama’s foreign policy in the Middle East and bashed the president for policies “that have supported the Muslim Brotherhood,” Rep. John Fleming (R-LA) told the Daily Beast.
According to Fleming, Cheney characterized the Muslim Brotherhood as “the beginning of all the Islamist groups that we’re dealing with now like Hamas and ISIS.”
Other Republicans echoed King with praise for Cheney and his foreign policy advice.
“He has a great history with foreign policy,” Rep. Markwayne Mullin (R-OK) said, according to The Hill. “He was giving us a lay of the land, and telling us what he feels the threat could turn in to.”
Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-IL) said he hoped Cheney’s discussion resonated with members of Congress who “have kind of had this creep toward isolationism in the Congress lately.”
According to Newsmax, Cheney also called for a pro-military 2016 Republican nominee for president. Rep. Tom Cole (R-OK) said that the former Vice President “wants to play an important role and should play an important role in shaping what the foreign policy and security concerns of the Republican Party are going forward.”
“If there was a single takeaway, it was that we’ve got to stop this decline of the American military,” Cole said, according to Newsmax.
