August 12, 2007 (LPAC)--A videotape has surfaced on the YouTube.com which appears to show an April 15, 1994 appearance by then-ex-Defense Secretary Dick Cheney at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) in Washington, saying that any U.S. invasion of Iraq would bring U.S. armed forces into "a quagmire" and isolate the United States--just as Cheney's occupation of Iraq has done in fact.
The video is reported by Raw Story on Aug. 12 to have been placed on the YouTube.com by a group called Grand Theft Country. Here is Cheney, then, answering questions at AEI on Iraq:
Question: Do you think the U.S., or U.N. forces, should have moved into Baghdad?
Cheney: No.
Question: Why not?
Cheney: 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.
The other thing was casualties. Everyone was impressed with the fact we were able to do our job 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.
