PARIS, FRANCE — Officials in the French government are confirming at the time of publication that they are in conversations with high-level French attorneys in an effort to determine if a bill for cleaning up after the horrific massacre in the streets of Paris late Friday night should be sent to former Vice President Dick Cheney.
The Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, or ISIS, has claimed responsibility for a series of deadly attacks that were carried out at multiple locations in the City of Light on Friday, November 13th. The attackers used automatic weapons and explosive devices to bring carnage the likes of which Paris hasn’t seen since the end of the Second World War. At least 120 are dead, dozens more are wounded. France’s president, François Hollande declared a state of emergency for the entire country, and the first mandatory curfew since 1944 was instituted.
At a press conference in the early hours of Saturday morning, Marie Archambault — Hollande’s Chief Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Press — addressed reporters, and it was then that the idea of sending a bill for the clean-up be sent to former Vice-President Dick Cheney.
“The way we see it,” Archambault told the reporters, “if ISIS did indeed perpetrate this attack, that means Dick Cheney, George W. Bush, Paul Wolfowitz, Condoleeza Rice, and Colin Powell all share at least some of the blame for this attack.” According to Ms. Archambault, the French government believes “ISIS rose to power out of the vacuum created by the illegal, unjust, and frankly stupid Iraq War.” She said that France is “not saying that America or Dick Cheney perpetrated this act” but rather they are insisting “that were it not for Mr. Cheney and his ilk destroying what tiny semblance of order we had in this region” that “there would be no ISIS, at least not in this way.”
Reporters asked Archambault if she or any other French officials feel the flood of Syrian refugees into France could be blamed for the attack, perhaps helping to disguise would-be attackers. “It seems really cold and stupid to blame refugees who were coming here to escape the violence we saw last night in Paris for the violence we saw last night in Paris,” Archambault said dismissively. “Again,” she said, “we’re not blaming Dick Cheney directly for this night of carnage, we are simply pealing back the onion layers of time to get down to the root of the issue, which is the disastrous decision that Cheney and his friends made to lead his country, and indeed the world, into a war in Iraq for literally no justifiable reason.”
When asked if President Hollande feels the decision by President Obama to essentially end the Iraq War and pull many of the troops that were in the country out helped fuel any of the violence in the region that has now clearly bled into France. ” Archambault was not impressed with this idea. “President Obama was merely keeping to the status of force agreement Bush signed,” she said, “and besides, that’s like handing someone a grenade with the pin already removed and getting mad at them for having to clean their fingers off the wall.”
“All told, Mr. Cheney’s Haliburton made $39.5 billion in Iraq,” Archambault said while explaining to reporters why they are debating billing Cheney for the cleanup. “It’s going to take a lot of money to clean up our streets,” she added, “and to pay for the emergency medical teams that have been trying to save as many lives as possible. Maybe Mr. Cheney could look into his company’s books to find a spare billion or two to help with this process.”
Reporters asked Ms. Archambault if there were any external forces that the world should look at as at least contributing to the factors that brought the attack to fruition. “At some point the American people are going to have to reckon with the fact that their government helped this horrific night happen,” she said after a moment to think. “I am confident that a great many millions of them already do, and that’s why war has been such an unpopular proposition in that country for so long,”Archambault said.
“But they’re still bombing in Syria,” Archambault told reporters of U.S. foreign policy, adding that the United States is still “arming rebels that could one day decide to turn on the Western world.” Archambault said that “France has made its own decisions in foreign policy, and we will have to live with the consequences of our own actions. But there is no doubt that ISIS would not exist in the form that it is in today were it not for Dick Cheney and George W. Bush’s administration decimating Iraq and being absolutely terrible at building it back up again.”
As the press conference was ending, Archambault summed-up her government’s thinking by saying, “The blood of every victim in Paris is on Mr. Cheney’s hands. It might be hard to see it mixed in with all the other blood, but it’s there.”
