Wayne Barrett: Romney, Cheney, Rove, Franks Raise the White Flag on Iraq

Dick Cheney was scheduled to appear at a $15,000 a head Beverly Hills luncheon fundraiser for Mitt Romney on Monday, giving him a chance to watch the foreign policy debate that night from Hollywood. It would have been a fitting place for Cheney to hear his old fighting buddy from the Vietnam deferment trenches, Mitt Romney, auditioning for president, declare: "We don't want another Iraq. We don't want another Afghanistan. That's not the right course for us." Apparently, our warrior veep is the forgiving type, because he, Glenn Beck and Josh Romney made a joint appearance at a gala Texas fundraiser on Thursday night. Praised by Romney for his "wisdom and judgment" earlier this year, Cheney even threw a $4 million bash for Mitt at his Jackson Hole, Wyoming home in July, where reporters in attendance were told that no photos of the two together could be taken. Like every other neo-con soldier in my dreams vet on Romney's national security and foreign policy advisory committee, the ex veep is apparently not taking all the peace pablum, Romney served up at the final debate too seriously. Neither is Karl Rove, who once headed the White House Iraq Group and now runs American Crossroads, the ultimate Romney superpac. The night before the debate, Rove appeared at Duke University to tussle with Howard Dean about an array of issues, with Rove still pushing the value of "boots on the ground" to counter terror. Peter Wehner, who ran Rove's Office of Strategic Initiatives and said as late as 2008 that he didn't "see any reason why you'd get away" from the "working" Iraq war policies, is now the senior adviser to the Romney campaign who blogs on its website. Wehner, regarded as "the intellectual" of the Bush White House, is the only person to get special thanks from Romney in the acknowledgements of his 2012 book, "No Apology," and from Rove in his 2010 memoir "Courage and Consequence," where Wehner is described as a "trusted former colleague" who "helped craft every chapter and every episode."