It seems like a lifetime ago when Bush, and his cronies like Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, were beating the war drums back in 2002 and 2003 about how “grave” a threat Iraq was to the security of the United States. I can still remember the day the war started and the day just a few weeks later when Bush ridiculously landed on an aircraft carrier in a flight suit declaring “mission accomplished.”
Yet here we are, it’s 2014, and Iraq is back in the news as radical Islamic militants known as I.S.I.S. continue to take over numerous cities within the country.
Recently I ran across comments made in 1991, by a Republican of all people, who essentially predicted the chaos we’re now seeing in Iraq if we were to ever invade and overthrow Saddam Hussein:
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.
Who said these comments? Well, none other than our then Secretary of Defense, Dick Cheney.
The same man who in 2002 and 2003 said we would be greeted as “liberators” upon invading and occupying Iraq. It’s amazing how becoming the CEO of Halliburton (a gigantic defense corporation which massively profited from our invasion of Iraq) can drastically change how one views going to war.
Not only that, but in a 2009 interview on Face the Nation he bragged about the SOFA agreement Bush had signed with the Iraqi government to have all U.S. troops out of Iraq by 2011 as evidence of “success” in the country.
Yet now he’s trying to blame the lack of U.S. forces in Iraq, which has allowed these insurgents to seize control of parts of the country, on President Obama.
It’s some of the most blatant lying I’ve ever seen by someone with the stature of being a former vice president. I’ve honestly never seen a man sit there, knowing he’s blatantly lying, who seems to not at all care that evidence can easily be found to completely debunk nearly everything he’s saying. Not only that, he knew in 1991 what a mess Iraq would be if we ever tried to remove Saddam from power.
But that didn’t stop him from being one of the key figures who pushed for the Iraq War in 2003.
To even call Dick Cheney human is difficult for me to do. While science tells me he’s clearly a part of our species, he seems to lack all signs of humanity normally associated with human beings.
Dick Cheney should be in prison, not making appearances in the media criticizing President Obama for his handling of the mess he helped orchestrate.
Watch Cheney’s 2009 interview below:
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