Video unearthed by Grand Theft Country - Darth Cheney in 1994, explaining why invading Baghdad and getting rid of Saddam wasn’t a great idea — and how it would create a quagmire.
More at E&P. When can the impeachment proceedings begin?
Because if we’d gone to Baghdad we would have been all alone. There wouldn’t have been anybody else with us. There would have been a U.S. occupation of Iraq. None of the Arab forces that were willing to fight with us in Kuwait were willing to invade Iraq.Once you got to Iraq and took it over, 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 of Iraq, you could very easily end up seeing pieces of Iraq fly off: part of it, the Syrians would like to have to the west, part of it — eastern Iraq — the Iranians would like to claim, they fought over it for eight years. In the north you’ve got the Kurds, and if the Kurds spin loose and join with the Kurds in Turkey, then you threaten the territorial integrity of Turkey.
It’s a quagmire if you go that far and try to take over Iraq.
15 Responses to “Darth in 1994: going into Baghdad is a bad idea”
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I’m surprised this is getting re-noticed only now; I seem to remember the quote coming up quite frequently during the actual anti-war debates in 2002 and 2003. Of course, MechaCheney 3000 is perfectly consistent so long as the paradigm is “Whatever a Republican President and the military-industrial complex he controls (or that controls him) decide to do is correct at all times and in perpetuity.”
Not to worry! See our great military and political leadership have implemented a plan which will calm ‘Shooters’ worries….
Or…maybe not…
Yeah, but Cassandra Liberals are the worst. They see what’s coming down the pike and say so and outline plainly why it’s bad so others can check the work and see it for themselves. (OMFG, WHAT LUNATICS!)
Being Prematurely Anti-Stupid is even worse than being wrong or right because it inconveniences everyone, which is a fate worse than death.
At the time, Total Dick Cheney was serving the cause of right by being a huge balled infallible sex/war god and to hint otherwise would have empowered Saddam and set off his huge stash of WMDs.
I recall as well the entire debate about not invading Iraq and taking Saddam and I recall it being dismissed as shril warmongering by war mongers.
Once Cheney saw money in them hills, his moral reserve went out the window. They absolutely should be tried for war crimes, but with the UN and other international bodies being controlled completely by the US, I doubt such will ever come.
Sorry, off-topic, but this needs to be brought to your attention:
http://miaculpa.blogspot.com/2007/08/when-air-force-rapes-you.html
Of course it would have been bad if the US had done it in 1994. Why, with Clinton in charge, some of the reconstruction money might have gone to Iraqis to reconstruct in Iraq, rather than (as under Bush) to Halliburton to help pay Cheney’s pension.
How can he have been so right then, and so wrong now?
Staggering!
Do you think that after 10 years of a crippling embargo and the destruction of the Iraqi infrastructure and army, Cheney really did believe that a starving Iraqi population would perceive the invasion as liberation and that not many Americans would be lost?
My guess is that he thought he saw an opportunity to invade a defenseless nation in order to supplement his retirement.
Staggering!
By the way, Karl Rove is gone now.
Unbelievable.
My guess is he might just remain an “outside consultant,” but he’s stepping down to prevent a bigger scandal.
Now he tells us.
Wouldn’t there perhaps be another video that could be juxtaposed a la the Daily Show of Cheney recently stating “no one could have seen this sectarian violence coming, etc.” ?
Please compare this statement by Cheney:
http://thinkprogress.org/2006/06/19/cheney-violence-iraq/
“Cassandra Liberals” is a good phrase.
Remember, the original Cassandra (of Troy) was cursed to be 100% accurate in her predictions, none of which would be believed.
Those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it. Those who do learn from history are doomed to say “I told you so!”
First Karl Rove, and now this–and it’s not even my birthday! Somebody get the popcorn: watching The Big Dick try to weasel out of this (”That was before we found out they were linked with, uh, Al Qaeda, yeah, that’s it, that’s why…”) will be such a FUN show.
Why does 1994 Cheney hate America?
Hm, if Cheney knew the war was a bad idea from the start, we can convict him of treason, right?
Since the war in Iraq is illegal, we can recover the money by defaulting on all Iraq war contracts and demanding that the companies involved pay back everything they received, or face charges for fighting an illegal war, right?
No?
Can we at least ship Bush and Cheney to the Hague for war crimes trials?
Damn!