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Wed. Mar 14, 2007

Cheney Is Not Always Wrong

It’s become popular for pundits to say that Dick Cheney has literally gotten everything wrong. Wrong about Saddam and the certainty of WMD. Wrong about how we would be welcomed as liberators. Wrong about how the insurgency was in its last throes. Just plain wrong for so long he’s become a reverse barometer.

It simply isn’t true:

“I think for us to get American military personnel involved in a civil war inside Iraq would literally be a quagmire. Once we got to Baghdad, what would we do? Who would we put in power? What kind of government would we have? Would it be a Sunni government, a Shi’a government, a Kurdish government? Would it be secular, along the lines of the Ba’ath Party? Would be fundamentalist Islamic? I do not think the United States wants to have U.S. military forces accept casualties and accept the responsibility of trying to govern Iraq. I think it makes no sense at all.”

That was Dick Cheney in 1991, asking all the right questions. The same questions for which no one in the Bush administration seemed to have an answer after Saddam’s regime crumbled a dozen years later in April, 2003. Or in the nearly four years that have passed since.

Today, he says those who ask similar questions or make similar statements are undermining our troops. His intent is to publicly impugn their patriotism, not their logic.

Because their logic comes straight from the horse’s mouth, 16 years removed.