“It would have been a mistake for us to get bogged down in the quagmire inside Iraq” – Dick Cheney


Quotes from Laurence M. Vance: http://www.lewrockwell.com/vance/vance70.html

[The point of re-printing excerpts of these old speeches is to debunk the notion that the Bush administration’s invasion of Iraq and its disastrous aftermath was caused primarily by arrogance, stupidity, and incompetence. What changed Cheney’s mind about invading Iraq was 9/11. They thought the American people would give them a blank check to wage wars around the world as long as the stated aim was to prevent any more 9/11s in the future.]

Dick Cheney, Washington Institute for Near East Policy in April of 1991:


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’ia 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.

From 1992 a speech he gave in Seattle at the Discovery Institute on the same question:


And the question in my mind is how many additional American casualties is Saddam worth?

And the answer is not very damned many.

So I think we got it right, both when we decided to expel him from Kuwait, but also when the president made the decision that we’d achieved our objectives and we were not going to go get bogged down in the problems of trying to take over and govern Iraq.

All of a sudden you’ve got a battle you’re fighting in a major built-up city, a lot of civilians are around, significant limitations on our ability to use our most effective technologies and techniques.

Once we had rounded him up and gotten rid of his government, then the question is what do you put in its place? You know, you then have accepted the responsibility for governing Iraq.

Now what kind of government are you going to establish? Is it going to be a Kurdish government, or a Shi’ia government, or a Sunni government, or maybe a government based on the old Baathist Party, or some mixture thereof?

You will have, I think by that time, lost the support of the Arab coalition that was so crucial to our operations over there.

I would guess if we had gone in there, I would still have forces in Baghdad today, we’d be running the country. We would not have been able to get everybody out and bring everybody home.

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