In the category of “you never know what you’ll find until you look,” the Seattle Post-Intelligencer today offers up a little-noticed 1992 speech in Seattle by then-Defense Secretary Dick Cheney, in which he warned of getting “bogged down in the problems of trying to take over and govern Iraq.”
“And the question in my mind is how many additional American casualties is Saddam worth?” Cheney asked his audience. “And the answer is not very damned many.”
A transcript of the Cheney speech was first tracked down by Post-Intelligencer columnist Joel Connelly, who cited it as one example of numerous flip-flops by the Bush-Cheney administration. In today’s news story, the P-I‘s Washington correspondent Charles Pope writes:
Despite his reservations 12 years ago, Cheney was one of this administration’s vocal and unrelenting supporters of invading Iraq. The decision was based on Saddam’s reported development of nuclear, biological and other weapons of mass destruction that Bush and Cheney said posed a direct and imminent threat to the United States.
No weapons, however, have been found.
While both President Bush and Vice President Cheney have been especially critical of John Kerry’s inconsistencies on Iraq, writes Pope, and the future of Iraq and the war on terror are expected to be the dominant topic of tomorrow night’s first presidential debate, 12 years ago it was a different story. In his 1992 remarks, writes Pope, “Cheney foreshadowed a future in Iraq that is remarkably close to conditions found there today, suggesting that it would be difficult to bring the country’s various political factions together and that U.S. troops would be vulnerable to insurrection and guerrilla attacks”:
“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,” Cheney said, 18 months after the [Gulf] war ended.
One germane question neither Pope nor Connelly addresses: Why didn’t the Kerry campaign sniff out the speech on its own sometime over the past nine months? And — even more relevant — why did we have to wait until September 29 for a reporter with a few minutes of down time to search “Cheney AND Iraq AND [your city here].”
Who knows what might pop up?
–Susan Q. Stranahan
Susan Q. Stranahan wrote for CJR.