On Sept. 8, Dick Cheney will deliver an address at the American Enterprise Institute in the hopes of torpedoing the Iranian nuclear agreement. As his Wall Street Journal op-ed this week suggests, Cheney will argue that "the U.S. Congress should reject this deal and reimpose the sanctions that brought Iran to the table in the first place" because "the Obama agreement will lead to a nuclear-armed Iran, a nuclear-arms race in the Middle East and, more than likely, the first use of a nuclear weapon since Hiroshima and Nagasaki."

As turns out, Cheney's sabotage mission is more than a little ironic. After all, Vice President Dick Cheney was completely and catastrophically wrong about Iraq when he declared, "Simply stated, there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction. There is no doubt he is amassing them to use against our friends, against our allies, and against us." Halliburton CEO Dick Cheney railed against Bill Clinton's sanctions on Tehran, complaining that U.S. firms were "cut out of the action" because our "sanction-happy" government failed to recognize that "the good Lord didn't see fit to always put oil and gas resources where there are democratic governments." And the last time he was to address AEI on the subject of Iran in 1989, Rep. Dick Cheney insisted Congress had no right to interfere with the president's conduct of foreign policy at all.

You read that right. In the wake of the Iran-Contra crisis that rocked the Reagan administration, Cheney in March 1989 was scheduled to speak to AEI on "Congressional Overreaching in Foreign Policy." But while that address was never delivered due his nomination to Secretary of Defense, Cheney's draft describes almost unlimited executive power with no role for Congress:



[C]ongressional overreaching has systematic policy effects. It is important to be clear at the outset that my argument is about systematic effects , not individual policy disagreements. For example, Congress' efforts to dictate diplomatic bargaining tactics, as well as the efforts by individual members to conduct back channel negotiations on their own, make it extremely difficult for the country to sustain a consistent bargaining posture for an extended time period, whomever the president and whatever the policy. [Emphasis original.]

For Cheney, of course, not all presidents are created equal. Once upon a time, he furiously condemned Congressional interference with the president's policy towards Iran. Condemned it, that is, provided the president was not Barack Obama but Ronald Reagan and the issue wasn't limiting Iran's arsenal, but enhancing it

That's right. In the aftermath of the arms-for-hostages scandal that engulfed President Reagan beginning in 1986, the minority Republican response to the congressional Iran-Contra investigation declared that Congress, not the White House, had done something wrong.

The ironic trip down memory lane continues below.