[NYTr] Cheney: prophet of doom

[All the News That Doesn't Fit]

sent by Tsimonds (activ-l)

The Guardian - Aug 16, 2007
http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/brian_whitaker/2007/08/cheney_prophet_of_doom.html

Cheney: prophet of doom

by Brian Whitaker

Well, no one can say the Bush administration didn't see it coming. The
likely consequences of invading Iraq were clear as long ago as 1994, as
this prophetic warning shows:

"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."

And who was the far-sighted person predicting the quagmire? None other
than Dubya's right-hand man, Dick Cheney.

A video of Cheney explaining why the president's father decided not to
invade Iraq after liberating Kuwait in 1991 surfaced on YouTube last
Friday and by early this morning had been viewed 522,011 times.

The clip continues with Cheney talking about the Kuwait war and asking
"how many additional dead Americans is Saddam worth?"

"Everyone was impressed with the fact we were able to do our job [in
Kuwait] with as few casualties as we had. But for the 146 Americans
killed in action, and for their families - it wasn't a cheap war. And
the question for the president, in terms of whether or not we went on
to Baghdad, took additional casualties in an effort to get Saddam
Hussein, was how many additional dead Americans is Saddam worth?

Our judgment was, not very many, and I think we got it right."

US military casualties in Iraq currently stand at 3,699 dead. Plus, of
course, countless thousands of Iraqi civilians.

The URL for the video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6BEsZMvrq-I