Wrong.
Their politics of fear. "Keep them afraid."
They were terrorists themselves.
A mere sideshow, and a means to an end. They would have used whatever would have worked, from fear to howling for blood to righteous anger -- it didn't matter.
Terrorists do acts to cause terror. Cheney and his patsy didn't care if anyone was terrorized or not; they
just didn't care. If Iraq had gone down with zero casualties, or with a hundred thousand, it would have been no different to them -- the point was "securing the future" in terms of the world as a chess board.
The nice thing about a terrorist is you know how he's going to treat you. With the Cheney program, there was no knowing; he would change in an instant if it was convenient. The only people who were human to him were those in his power circles, and the enemy -- but the enemy just barely, just enough that he counted as an opponent to play against. The rest, all of us included, didn't even count as pawns; we were all just statistics to him.
Reading Kissinger and listening to him, and seeing the links with Cheney, chilled me. I've read Machiavelli, and while people think of him as ruthless, he still admonished the ruler to care for the people. Next to Cheney, Machiavelli was a good buddy advocating a quite benevolent sort of regime, even a compassionate one. Cheney makes Machiavelli look warm and comforting.
Back to the terrorist: he sees his targets as people; he wants to evoke emotion in them. But Cheney was even less human than that; terror was of no more interest to him than hunger or plague or mass celebrations -- all were mere tools to manipulate the statistics to reach the desired impetus.
So Cheney doesn't qualify as a terrorist at all, but not because he wasn't as evil, rather because he was and I presume remains seriously less human. He has work to do and progress to make to even rise to the moral stature of a terrorist.
So when I object to you calling him a terrorist, I'm not saying you're degrading him, I'm saying you're giving him credit not due, indeed ascribing to him a level of moral character he fails even to reach.
