Daniel DePetris suffered through Dick Cheney’s AEI speech on the nuclear deal yesterday, and this is what he heard:

Rather than straight-up facts, Cheney relied on a combination of fear, inaccuracies, distortions, and faulty assumptions about what the JCPOA says and what it attempts to achieve.

As DePetris points out, this is how Cheney always talks about these issues. Cheney misrepresented the content of the nuclear deal, grossly distorting its provisions, and he engaged in the most shameless and dishonest fear-mongering possible. Among other things, Cheney asserted that the deal “gives Tehran the means to launch a nuclear attack on the U.S. homeland,” which is both absolutely false and entirely in keeping with the hawkish tendency to invent and exaggerate threats to suit their propaganda needs. When one listens to Iran hawks’ claims about the deal, it is usually a safe bet that the truth is the exact opposite of what they say.

DePetris notes later in his piece that Cheney also endorses the fantasy of a “better deal” that will be achieved by insisting on maximalist demands:

What Cheney is effectively arguing for is the return of the U.S. policy during the Bush administration: the U.S. will not enter diplomacy with the Iranians unless they capitulate on the entirety of its nuclear program and give up on uranium enrichment. That position didn’t work then, and it’s not going to work now. In an ideal world, Tehran would scrap their program and any domestic nuclear infrastructure that they have. But we live in the real world, where the Iranians have demonstrated time and again that they will resist surrendering to the international community without getting something hefty in return. In Cheney’s view, no diplomatic process should occur with the Iranians unless Khamenei orders his scientists to stop enriching. The notion that this would work when Iran is in a stronger position than they were during the Bush administration (back then, Iran had a few thousand centrifuges; now it has a total of 19,000) is a fantasy.

Indeed, Iran’s nuclear program came to be in a much stronger position in large part because the previous administration refused to budge on the very demand of no enrichment that Cheney wants to revive. All of this is a reminder that Cheney had and still has no interest in securing an agreement that successfully limits Iran’s nuclear program, because he is ideologically opposed to making the compromises that make such agreements possible.