Snortblog

My wife said this was like watching an Oracle that had lost his way.

An interviewer asks Dick Cheney why the U.S. didn’t invade Iraq in 1994.

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

No.

Why not?

Because if we’d gone into Baghdad, we would have been all alone, there wouldn’t have been anybody else with us. It 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. Uh, once you got to Iraq, and took it over, and took down Saddam Hussein’s government, then what are you going to put in it’s place? That’s a very volatile part of the world and if you take down the central government in Iraq, you can 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 [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 quagmire. If you go that far and try to take over Iraq. Another thing is casualties. Everyone was impressed with the fact that we were able to do our jobs 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 Hussein worth? In our judgment it was not very many and I think we got it right.