Cheney, the wise man: The evidence on video
On April 7, 1991 Cheney appeared on ABC news’s This Weekas the then U.S. Secretary of Defense in the George H.W. Bush Administration. Secretary Cheney was asked by the late elder statesman of ABC News, David Brinkley, why the U.S. government did not invade Iraq proper after the liberation of Kuwait in Operation Desert Storm.
BRINKLEY: One other question — it keeps coming up. Why didn’t we go to Baghdad and clean it all up while we were there?
Sec. CHENEY: Well, just as it’s important, I think, for a president to know when to commit U.S. forces to combat, it’s also important to know when not to commit U.S. forces to combat. 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 it 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.
A repeat of these talking points can be seen on a YouTube clip, apparently of an interview on C-SPAN in 1994. In the interview, then ex-Secretary of Defense Cheney offered roughly the same talking points as he did on ABC News in 1991. He then added ominously: |
