Education Quote by Dick Cheney

The jab lands first: “retired military officers embedded in TV studios.” Cheney doesn’t just disagree with critics of the Iraq War plan; he demotes them. “Retired” implies irrelevance, “embedded” suggests they’re accessories to media spectacle rather than practitioners of serious strategy, and “TV studios” paints them as performers. It’s an ad hominem dressed up as a diagnosis of modern punditry, meant to make skepticism look like a cable-news hobby, not a legitimate professional warning.

Then comes the pivot that does the real work: “with every advance… the wisdom of that plan becomes more apparent.” It’s a classic wartime rhetorical move, substituting momentum for proof. Tactical progress becomes a moral and strategic verdict. The phrasing is deliberately self-sealing: any success confirms the plan; setbacks can be framed as temporary noise on the path to inevitable vindication. Notice, too, the possessive “our coalition forces,” which wraps policy authorship in battlefield solidarity. If you question the plan, you risk sounding like you’re questioning “our” troops.

The context is the early Iraq invasion period, when rapid advances and collapsing Iraqi resistance provided potent visuals and a tempting narrative arc. Cheney’s intent is twofold: discipline the information environment by stigmatizing dissent, and preempt the harder questions that don’t show up on a map with arrows - occupation, governance, sectarian fallout. The line works because it exploits a media ecosystem hungry for decisive footage, turning short-term movement into long-term legitimacy.