Cheney on Iraq, 1994

Brent Scowcroft, national security adviser under the first President Bush, has said of his old friend, then secretary of defense, “This is not the Dick Cheney I knew.”

The following is an excerpt (LINK) from a 1994 interview with Dick Cheney. The interview has been featured recently on C-SPAN and is now on YouTube.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Do you think that U.S. or U.N. forces should have moved into Baghdad?

RICHARD B. CHENEY, FORMER U.S. SECRETARY OF DEFENSE: No.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Why not?

CHENEY: Because if we had gone to Baghdad, we would have been all alone. There wouldn't have been anybody else with us. There would have been a U.S. 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 of Iraq, you could very easily end up seeing pieces of Iraq fly off. Part of it, the Syrians would like to have, to the west. Part of eastern Iraq, the Iranians would like to claim, fought over for eight years.

In the north, you have got the Kurds. And, if the Kurds spin loose and join with the Kurds in Turkey, then you threaten the territorial integrity of Turkey. It's a quagmire if you go that far and try to take over Iraq.

The other thing was casualties. Everyone was impressed with the fact that 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, took additional casualties in an effort to get Saddam Hussein was: how many additional dead Americans is Saddam worth?

And, our judgment was not very many. And, I think we got it right.

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In a recent interview on ABC, Cheney was asked to respond to similar comments he had made after “Operation Desert Storm.” His reason for a change of heart? “9/11” – once more making the connection between the 2001 attacks and Saddam Hussein.

That is just bullsh*t! Cheney signed the “Statement of Principles” (LINK) of the “Project for the New American Century” (PNAC) – official think tank of the neoconservatives - on 3 June 1997 and had his sights on Saddam from that day until we invaded Iraq.

Stop lying, Mr. Vice President, and stop using 9/11 as an excuse for imperialism.