Cheney Predicts Iraq Mess He Created

Posted by Kombiz Lavasany on September 27, 2007 at 03:36 PM

In this recently-unearthed video of Dick Cheney in 1992, he defends the first Bush Administration's decision not to occupy Iraq. In the video Dick Cheney asks some very persistent questions about occupying Iraq.

"But let's assume for the moment that we would have been able to do it...Then the question comes [of] putting a government in place of the one you've just gotten rid of; you can't just sort of turn around and walk away--you have now accepted the responsibility for what happens in Iraq. What kind of government do you want us to create in place of the old Saddam Hussein government? Do you want a Sunni government, or a Shi'a government or maybe it ought to be a Kurdish government, or maybe one based on the Ba'ath Party or maybe some combination of all of those? How long is that government likely to survive without U.S. military forces there to keep it propped up?

We would have been in a situation once we went into Baghdad where we would have engaged in the kind of street by street house to house fighting in an urban setting that would have been dramatically different from what from what we were able to do in the gulf...

You would have been fighting in a build up urban area, large civilian population and much heavier prospects for casualties.

You would have found as well I think the disintegration of the arab coalition that signed on to support us in our efforts to eject the Iraqis from Kuwait but never signed on for the proposition that the United States would become some kind of quasi permanent occupier of a major middle eastern nation.

If you get into the business of committing U.S. forces on the ground in Iraq, to occupy the place, my guess is I'd probably still have people there today instead of having been able to bring them home...The bottom line question for me was: How many additional American lives is Saddam Hussein worth? The answer: not very damn many."

The question is whether Vice President Dick Cheney even asked himself those question in 2003.

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