By Brigitte L. Nacos
When searching archived video tapes for material to be part
of a day-long program about the “Life and Career of Dick Cheney” on C-SPAN 3,
producer Emmanuel Touhey discovered a C-SPAN interview with the former
secretary of defense from 1994. At the time of this interview, when Cheney
himself contemplated a run for the White House, C-SPAN’s Bruce Collins asked
him why he had been against U.S.forces moving on to Baghdad during the first Persian Gulf War. Cheney said, “It’s a quagmire, if you go
that far and try to take over Iraq.”Moreover, as the video material now available on YOUTUBE reveals, nine
years before the 2003 invasion of Iraq and the removal of Saddam Hussein,
Cheney predicted precisely what has unfolded in Iraq since the invasion and the fall of Saddam
Hussein. In 1994 he asked rhetorically, what would happen after the
removal of Saddam Hussein and the central government? His answer was that that pieces
of the country would be “flying up” and that Syria would try to take a piece of western Iraq, Iran part of the Eastern
part, and a consolidated Kurdish part would be a threat to Turkey. Noting that 146 Americans
had died during the Persian Gulf War, Cheney asked furthermore: How many additional
dead Americans is Saddam worth?"
As of today (according to Iraq Coalition Casualties), 4,004
members of the coalition forces have died since the invasion started in March
2003—3,707 of them American servicemen- and –women. 23,308 coalition forces,
23,877 of them Americans, were wounded or for other reasons medically
evacuated. And it is a good bet that many, many more innocent Iraqis were
killed and maimed and millions forced to leave their homeland.
Mary Ann
Akers wrote in the Washington Post that Cheney during an
interview with ABC News earlier this year was asked “how his views had changed from 1991, when he also
spoke of military action in Iraq
as a ‘quagmire.’ ‘Well, I stand by what I said in '91," Cheney told ABC.
"But look what's happened since then -- we had 9/11."
Since there is no credible evidence for a connection between Iraq and Saddam Hussein on the one hand and
9/11 on the other, it is high time for the vice-president to ask: How many additional dead
Americans are the dead Saddam Hussein and the Iraq quagmire worth?
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