The Seattle Post-Intelligencer appears to have the scoop-of-the-day. If it’s accurate, it may be a big one for the campaign.
Dick Cheney appeared at a meeting of a conservative group called the Discovery Institute on Aug. 14, 1992. He was, at the time, still the Secretary of Defense, and was eventually questioned about the first war in Iraq which had wrapped up 18 months prior.
As the Post-Intelligencer explained today, Cheney struck a far different note about the benefits of regime change then than he does now.
In an assessment that differs sharply with his view today, Dick Cheney more than a decade ago defended the decision to leave Saddam Hussein in power after the first Gulf War, telling a Seattle audience that capturing Saddam wouldn’t be worth additional U.S. casualties or the risk of getting “bogged down in the problems of trying to take over and govern Iraq.”
I went ahead and checked the transcript myself and Cheney’s remarks were stunning. The comments were extensive, but I’m going to post all of the relevant portion of his speech so readers can consider the full context. Pay particular attention to the last paragraph.
“The question that is usually asked is why didn’t we go on to Baghdad and get rid of him? And let me take just a moment and address that if I can, because it is an important issue. Now, as you think about watching him operate over there every day, it’s tempting to think it would be nice if he weren’t there, and clearly we’d prefer to have somebody else in power in Baghdad. But we made the decision not to go on to Baghdad because that was never part of our objective. It wasn’t what the country signed up for, it wasn’t what the Congress signed up for, it wasn’t what the coalition was put together to do. We stopped our military operations when we’d achieved our objective — when we’d liberated Kuwait and we’d destroyed most of his offensive capability — his capacity to threaten his neighbors. And no matter what he may say today, he knows full well that he lost two-thirds of his army, about half of his air force, most of his weapons of mass destruction, a lot of his productive capability. His military forces were decimated, and while he can try to regroup and reorganize now, he does not at present constitute a threat to his neighbors.
“If we’d gone on to Baghdad, we would have wanted to send a lot of force. One of the lessons we learned was don’t do anything in a half-hearted fashion. When we committed the forces to Kuwait, we sent a lot of force to make certain they could do the job. We would have moved from fighting in a desert environment, where you had clear areas where we knew who the enemy was. Everybody there was, in fact, an adversary — military, and there was no intermingling of any significant civilian population. If you go into the streets of Baghdad, that changes dramatically. 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. You probably would have had to run him to ground; I don’t think he would have surrendered and gone quietly to the slammer. 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 Suni government, or maybe a government based on the old Ba’athist 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 because none of them signed on for the United States to go occupy Iraq. 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.
“And the final point that I think needs to be made is this question of casualties. I don’t think you could have done all of that without significant additional US casualties. And while everybody was tremendously impressed with the low cost of the conflict, for the 146 Americans who were killed in action and for their families, it wasn’t a cheap war. 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.” (emphasis added)
Cheney in 1992, in other words, had it right. Cheney in 2004 isn’t even close.
If the transcript is right, and there’s no reason to believe it isn’t, Cheney’s going to have a tough time explaining why he was completely right 12 years ago and completely wrong now. It’s also a candidate for the flip-flopping Hall of Fame.
John Edwards was quick to pounce on the story, telling Imus this morning:
“[Cheney] was against getting bogged down in Iraq before he was for it.”