For months, reporters seem to have keyed in on a little parlor game: if you ask White House officials to name a mistake they’ve made, particularly in Iraq, they hem and haw, pretending not to understand the question. It’s become quite entertaining.
Dick “Go F— Yourself” Cheney, meanwhile, seems to have learned to expect the question and has even come up with an answer that suits him perfectly.
Vice President Dick Cheney said Thursday that he overestimated the pace of Iraq’s recovery from the U.S.-led invasion because he didn’t realize the lasting devastation wrought by Saddam Hussein on his people after the first Gulf War.
Asked to name his mistakes in planning the war in Iraq, Cheney said he had not anticipated how long it would take the Iraqis to begin running their own country. Not until after Saddam was ousted did the United States realize the extent of the Iraqi leader’s brutality in putting down revolt in 1991, Cheney said.
“I think the hundreds of thousands of people who were slaughtered at the time, including anybody who had the gumption to stand up and challenge him, made the situation tougher than I would have thought,” he said on The Don Imus Show on the radio.
“I would chalk that one up as a miscalculation, where I thought things would have recovered more quickly,” Cheney said.
How utterly classic. Ask to name a mistake in Iraq, Cheney’s response is that he expected the Iraqis to be better at reconstruction. The citizens of the country he attacked under false pretenses aren’t moving fast enough for him. This is the error that stands out in Cheney’s mind.
I couldn’t make this stuff up if I tried.