Everyone is talking this week about the comments Dick Cheney made in 1994 as to why invading Baghdad would be very bad idea. The YouTube link is here.
I am not sure if it was the comments or the date they were made that has everyone talking. Either way, I believe a talk he gave to the Washington Institute in 1991 is just as damning, if not more.
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Richard Cheney, then Secretary of Defense, gave a keynote speech to the Washington Institute for Near East Policy in 1991. The Institute changed their archive since I found this transcript a few years ago and I can't find a reference to the month, but I believe this was from April, 1991. Before I give you the money quote, I'd like to show one that I also found interesting:
It was a close-run thing as to whether or not the Congress of the United States would support the endeavor as well. And the debate in January, I think, turned out to be one of the more enlightened and high-quality debates I have seen during my twenty-some years in Washington. But there was some doubt as to whether or not we should even seek congressional approval, on the grounds that it might not be forthcoming, and if it was not forthcoming we did not want to have our hands tied in terms of dealing with the aggression that so clearly needed to be dealt with. It was another key moment of the crisis when the President made the right decision, and things worked well.
Just another example of Dick's philosophy that the Congress is only useful when they do exactly what the executive wants. If Congress is likely to disagree, don't ask and do it anyway.
As far as the '94 CSPAN interview showing either his prescience or his pathological lying, let's also examine his words from the 1991 speech:
I think that the proposition of going to Baghdad is also fallacious. I think if we were going to remove Saddam Hussein we would have had to go all the way to Baghdad, we would have to commit a lot of force because I do not believe he would wait in the Presidential Palace for us to arrive. I think we'd have had to hunt him down. And once we'd done that and we'd gotten rid of Saddam Hussein and his government, then we'd have had to put another government in its place.
What kind of government? Should it be a Sunni government or Shi'i government or a Kurdish government or Ba'athist regime? Or maybe we want to bring in some of the Islamic fundamentalists? How long would we have had to stay in Baghdad to keep that government in place? What would happen to the government once U.S. forces withdrew? How many casualties should the United States accept in that effort to try to create clarity and stability in a situation that is inherently unstable?
I think it is vitally important for a President to know when to use military force. I think it is also very important for him to know when not to commit U.S. military force. And it's my view that the President got it right both times, that it would have been a mistake for us to get bogged down in the quagmire inside Iraq.
So the next time these liars say they didn't know, throw their words right back at them. If you decide to use the quagmire word, it's o.k., they said it first.
Please read the whole keynote address, as the few bits I quoted here are just a small sample of his Constitution shredding bullshit.