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Cheney Calls Invading Baghdad a Quagmire

Back in 94′ that is…oh, and 92′

At the American Enterprise Institute in Washington D.C. on 4/15/94, Dick Cheney said invading Baghdad to take down Saddam Hussein would not be worth it in terms of American lives, and foresaw an occupation of Iraq as a quagmire. Cheney asserted that he and President George H. W. Bush were right not to pursue that course after Kuwait.

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Dick Cheney reveals his lost wisdom

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This was the same year Cheney considered his own presidential run. In a March 8, 2007 article for Time, Michael Duffy wrote that as Cheney…

“…decided to give running for President a try in 1994, he soon realized he was unsuited for the big game. He raised a million dollars and built a good organization, but he found that the little things got to him. His fund-raising dinners, Cheney told aides, “weren’t substantive enough.” He didn’t care to pal around with donors. He therefore called it off and never ran on his own again.”

This removal from people, from politics, from the sensors that make leaders responsive to people, turned into Cheney’s Achilles’ heel. And it actually deepened when he became Vice President. Bush picked Cheney because Cheney would never run again, but that also meant the newly minted Veep never had to put his ear to the ground.

4/15/94 video transcript:

Interviewer: “Do you think the U.S. or U.N. forces should have moved into Baghdad?”

Cheney: “No.”

“Why not?”

“Because if we’d gone to Baghdad we would have been all alone, there wouldn’t have been anybody else with us, it would have been a U.S. occupation of Iraq. None of the Arab forces that were willing to fight in Kuwait were willing to invade Iraq.”

“Once you got to Iraq and took it over and 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 in Iraq you can easily end up seeing pieces of Iraq fly off, part of it the Syrians would like to have to the west, part of eastern Iraq the Iranians would like to claim, fought em for eight years. In the north you have the Kurds. If the Kurds spin loose and join with the Kurds in Turkey then you’ve threatened 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 that we were able to do our job with as few causalities 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 and took additional casualties in an effort to get Saddam Hussein, was how many additional dead Americans is Saddam worth? And our judgment was not very many, and I think we got it right.”