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Cheney Warns of Iraq Quagmire ... in 1994

Via Editor & Publisher, a video surfaces of Cheney warning at the American Enterprise Institute in 1994 of the consequences of a U.S. invasion of Iraq.

Transcript:

Q: Do you think the U.S., or U.N. forces, should have moved into Baghdad?

A: No.

Q: Why not?

A: Because if we'd 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, 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 it -- eastern Iraq -- the Iranians would like to claim, they fought over it for eight years. In the north you've 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 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?

Our judgment was, not very many, and I think we got it right.

More echoes of Brent Scowcroft's line to the New Yorker two years ago: "I consider Cheney a good friend—I’ve known him for thirty years. But Dick Cheney I don’t know anymore.”

Comments

You know that evil sith overlord in all the star wars movies... the guy with the scary robe on most of the time...in the background shadows lurking, making sure his plans of galactic supremacy are being carried out? Dick Cheney.

Posted by: Jeff Jones on 08/13/07 at 1:20 PM

Strange how the need for greed trumps common sense.
I was disappointed that 41 didn't go after Saddam at the time.
However, hearing his reasoning made sense to me. Too bad his son was too dumb to listen; guess he was too busy talking to his "higher father".

Posted by: JamesL on 08/13/07 at 1:53 PM

Actually IF we should have toppled Saddam 1991 was when we should have done it. Number 41 incited various sects to rise up and overthrow Hussein to make our recapture of Kuwait easier. We left an organized resistance who would have owed our country big time dead in the water. We screwed the various interest groups in Iraq who generally wanted autonomy.

We did that because we knew that this autonomy would not be that amenable to US business [oil] interests and that the result would have been a loose confederation that would compound business for oil companies. We had fought confederation early and often - despite the willingness of most factions [Al Qaeda is NOT a serious faction in Iraq]to make this work. Even today, the best solution to a free Iraq involves a loose confederation of Iraqi states left to govern independent of central authority - an anathema to big oil. Given a choice between law and order and freedom the US has always sided with law and order. Democracies usually act towards furthering the best interests of the local populations - or at least more so than autocracies. The plutocrats who sponsor our political leadership simply don't trust democracies and freedom.

Posted by: JT Barrie on 08/13/07 at 2:13 PM