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What a difference nine years make

By jlynch on August 12, 2007.

Cheney in 1994: "And the question for the President in terms of whether or not we went on to Baghdad and took additional casualties in an effort to get Saddam Hussein, was how many additional dead Americans was Saddam worth? And our judgment was not very many, and I think we got that right."

Full transcript below the fold

"Because if we’d gone to Baghdad, we would have been all alone. There wouldn’t have been anybody else with us - it would have been a US occupation of Iraq. None of the Arab forces that were willing to fight with us in Kuwait were willing to invade Iraq. Once you got to Iraq and took it over, and took down Saddam Hussein’s government, then what are you going to put in its place? That’s a very volatile part of the world.

And if you take down the central government in Iraq, you could easily end up seeing pieces of Iraq fly off. Part of it...uh...the Syrians would like to have in the West. Part of the eastern part of Iraq the Iranians would like to claim, fought over it for eight years. In the north, you’ve got the Kurds. If the Kurds spin loose and join with the Kurds in Turkey, then you threaten the territorial integrity of Turkey. It’s a...it’s a quagmire, if you go that far in trying to take over Iraq.

The other thing was casualties. Uh...everyone was impressed with that fact that...uh...we were able to do our job with as few casualties as we had. But for the 146 Americans killed in action and for their families, it wasn’t a cheap war. And the question for the President in terms of whether or not we went on to Baghdad and took additional casualties in an effort to get Saddam Hussein, was how many additional dead Americans was Saddam worth? And our judgment was not very many, and I think we got that right."

Hat tip to Firedoglake for the transcript.

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I imagine he would say links to 9/11, the presence of terrorists in Iraq etc etc.

he would say non-existent links to 9/11, the presence of terrorists in Iraq after 2003.

Fixed that for ya.

By John Lynch (not verified) on 13 Aug 2007 #permalink

Not saying I agree, just that 9/11 and all that would probably be given as his justification. I suppose he might go further and argue for the need to democratise the middle-east, irrespective of the specific role (or lack thereof) that Iraq had in 9/11 and terrorism in general. Or something like that anyway.