For the record, I hate Wolf Blitzer. In fact, the man annoys me as much, if not more, than either George Bush or Dick Cheney. Which means that I suspect I will not be watching Blitzer's interview with Cheney later today. Thankfully, TPM has the transcript. Here's an excerpt:
Q The current situation there is very unstable.
THE VICE PRESIDENT: It is.Q The President himself speaks about a nightmare scenario right now. He was contained, as you repeatedly said throughout the '90s, after the first Gulf War, in a box, Saddam Hussein.
THE VICE PRESIDENT: Well, he was after the first Gulf War -- had managed -- he kicked out all the inspectors. He was providing payments to the families of suicide bombers. He was a safe haven for terror, was one of the prime state sponsors of terror, as designated by our State Department, for a long time. He'd started two wars. He had violated 16 U.N. Security Council resolutions. If he were still there today, we'd have a terrible situation. Today, instead --
Q But there is a terrible situation.
THE VICE PRESIDENT: No, there is not. There is not. There's problems, ongoing problems, but we have, in fact, accomplished our objectives of getting rid of the old regime, and there is a new regime in place that's been there for less than a year, far too soon for you guys to write them off. They have got a democratically written constitution, first ever in that part of the world. They've had three national elections. So there's been a lot of success.
So there you have it. According to the Vice President of the United States, there "is not" a "terrible situation" today in Iraq. Words fail me.
A second excerpt:
THE VICE PRESIDENT: Remember, remember me -- remember with me what happened in Afghanistan. The United States was actively involved in Afghanistan in the '80s supporting the effort against the Soviets. The Mujahideen prevailed, everybody walked away. And in Afghanistan, within relatively short order, the Taliban came to power, they created a safe haven for al Qaeda, training camps were established where some 20,000 terrorists trained in the late '90s. And out of that, out of Afghanistan, because we walked away and ignored it, we had the attack on the USS Cole, the attack on the embassies in East Africa, and 9/11, where the people trained and planned in Afghanistan for that attack and killed 3,000 Americans. That is what happens when we walk away from a situation like that in the Middle East.
Now you might have been able to do that before 9/11. But after 9/11, we learned that we have a vested interest in what happens on the ground in the Middle East. Now, if you are going to walk away from Iraq today and say, well, gee, it's too tough, we can't complete the task, we just are going to quit, you'll create exactly that same kind of situation again.
This is a version of the "9/11 changed everything" argument I hadn't heard before. The US involved itself heavily in Afghanistan in the 1980s. It even armed the groups that became al Qaeda and the Taliban. [This was, for the record, a set of policies Dick Cheney himself played an integral part in creating and maintaining.] But then, the US walked away. According to Cheney, it is because we walked away from the region, rather than that we involved ourselves with the wrong people in the first place, that 9/11 happened.
Or maybe not. Because then there is that "Now you might have been able to do that before 9/11" cavaet. And that just makes no sense. On the one hand, he's trying to claim those policies led to 9/11. On the other, he's saying that despite the fact that they led to 9/11 those polices were OK before 9/11. I've heard of incoherent, but wow...
Then again, if you were one of the people who helped arm the groups that became the Taliban and al Qaeda, maybe incoherence is your only refuge.
Cheney has learned all of the wrong lessons from his own history. The problem with Afghanistan wasn't that we walked away. It is that our earlier interventions, however right they may have seemed at the time, have had very severe long-term unintended consequences. That is the most important part of the story. And it is a part of the story that Cheney seems to have entirely missed.
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