dick cheney
08/13/2007
Cheney in '94: Bagdhad Invasion Would Create "Quagmire"
In this 1994 post-Desert-Storm interview, Dick Cheney is asked if UN troops should have invaded Bagdhad. His confident and emphatic reply? "No." And why is that? Well, he says:
1. If we'd gone in there, we would have been alone, without the support of other forces.
2. Once we'd taken down Saddam's regime, what would we put in its place? It's a volatile region, and if you destabilized the central government, you create the possibility of pieces of Iraq splitting off, either voluntarily or by the force of neighbors such as Syria and Iran.
3. While Desert Storm had a low-by-military-statistics number of casualties (146), as Cheney points out, those numbers were not small to the fallen soldiers or the people who loved them. So the natural next question becomes, "How many additional dead Americans is Saddam worth? And our judgement was, not very many, and I think we got it right."
Um... Was there some kind of pod person incident sometime after '94 I'm unaware of? Where was this guy in March 2003? 'Cause this guy is all chatty and reasonable and cautious and forthcoming with information and whatnot. But here we are with the thousands of dead Americans and the Iraqi citizens getting blown up by car bombs every day, and I look at this interview and I feel like Adam Sandler in The Wedding Singer: "Once again, things that could have been brought to my attention YESTERDAY!"
