On the morning of the Inauguration Vice President Dick Cheney and his wife Lynn were guests on Imus In the Morning. It was quite an interview and one that I wish I had gotten to hear first hand. Here's a little bit of it:
IMUS: Do you and the president feel like you got your chain jerked on the weapons of mass destruction? I mean, everybody thought they were there.
R. CHENEY: Well, I think—I’m not quite as sharp in my judgment as others. Clearly, he had no stockpiles, and we were told he did have stockpiles, obviously by our intelligence. But he had a lot of other things. He had the technology, he had the people who’d done it before. If you read the Duelfer report in detail, he kept open labs and the intelligence service that were still doing ongoing research and so forth. And he clearly had the intentions, once sanctions were lifted, that he would go back—be back in business again. So I think all of that has to be calculated and what we had to look at as well too.
The other thing I’d say is, it’s intelligence. It’s intelligence that you’re collecting against a regime that’s doing everything they can to deny you information, and we had prior track record.
One of the things that I’ve always remembered was that, in the run-up to the ‘91 Gulf War, I was briefed, when I was secretary of defense, on the status of his nuclear program then. And we believed he had a nuclear program, but the estimate was that he was several years away from producing a weapon. We found out after we got into Iraq, in fact, that he probably was less than a year away from having a nuclear weapon. In other words, that time around, the intelligence community had underestimated how robust his nuclear program was.
And you’re never going to have perfection, you can’t have absolute certainty. If it was easy to do we could have a computer to make those decisions. The president has to make those decisions on the best information he has, and I think that’s what we did.
IMUS: I’m not trying to be self-effacing, but we really aren’t as sophisticated as, say, Brit Hume or Tim Russert or any of these people, but the original mission in Iraq seemed to be to prevent them from blowing up Cleveland. And then it became—and correct me if I’m wrong—and then it became to create this democracy there. So when did that—is that right— and how did that change?
R. CHENEY: Well, I can understand why some people have the view that it was all about WMD. That was part of the case because of his obvious track record.
The second key ingredient was the fact that he did have an association with terror.
IMUS: And you guys said it was about that, too.
R. CHENEY: Right. He was paying suicide bombers to kill Israelis, he’d hosted Abu Nidal for years in Baghdad. He’d supported the Palestinian Islamic Jihad. And there was also evidence that he also had a relationship with Al Qaeda. There was debate with respect to how deep the relationship was, but George Tenet was on the Hill testifying that that relationship with Al Qaeda went back 10 years, to the early ‘90s, and there’s evidence to support that.
So there was this combination of a link to terror, as well as the track record with respect to weapons of mass destruction, as well as having started two wars, as well as having slaughtered hundreds of thousands of people. And we had every reason to believe that if he were left to his own devices, that he would, in fact, again become a significant threat, not only to the region, but to others, including the United States.
And that was our assessment of the situation at the time, and I think it was valid.
Now, what happened the reason the WMD, I think, got so much notice was because it was a quantifiable, measurable kind of thing and when we got into the United Nations, it became the focal point of the debate. The resolutions that were offered, 1441, for example, that was approved in the fall of 2002, focused specifically on his failure to come clean on his weapons of mass destruction, which he’d been required to do by the resolution that he’d signed back in ‘91.
And that was an argument that you could have and you could get people on board and say, “Yes, that’s right; he’s never come clean.” But there were a lot of other arguments and reasons too.
MSNBC has the interview transcript on its website. It's worth reading all of it. You can also listen to a replay of it here - for a while anyway.
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