Cheney Says Failing to Attack Iraq Would Have Been 'Irresponsible'

Friday, July 25, 2003; Page A01

Vice President Cheney launched a White House counterattack yesterday against rising criticism of the administration's handling of Iraq, arguing that failing to confront Saddam Hussein would have been "irresponsible in the extreme" and could have endangered the United States.

Cheney, a main architect of the administration's case for war, which Democrats are challenging as exaggerated, asserted that "the safety of the American people was at stake" because of Iraqi efforts to build weapons of mass destruction and "cultivate" ties with terrorist groups.

"At a safe remove from the danger, some are now trying to cast doubt upon the decision to liberate Iraq," Cheney said. "The ability to criticize is one of the great strengths of our democracy. But those who do so have an obligation to answer this question: How could any responsible leader have ignored the Iraqi threat?"

(snip)

Cheney did not mention the continuing U.S. casualties or the failure to discover weapons of mass destruction but said Americans "still have many tasks to complete in Iraq, and many dangers remain." He touched on the human rights crimes of Hussein's government. "If we had not acted, the torture chambers would still be in operation, the prison cells for children would still be filled, the mass graves would still be undiscovered," Cheney said.

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http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A42973-2003Jul24.html?nav=hptop_tb

because he is full of shit if he expects us to buy that pack of lies.

humanitarian concerns weren't the stated reasons we went to war. No, the administration relied on bogus intelligence. Notice Cheney doesn't address that.

Is he talking about the fact that he had "other priorities" during Vietnam?

Or is he talking about hiding from the press and public when the heat's on?

..... and the evident danger to his rapidly dwindling political career. There was no danger Dickie boy. Inspections...remember those, becasue your addle brained boss sure as hell does not, were working mighty well as I recall. Saddam was not busy acquiring chemical, biological and nuclear weapons while the UN inspectors were in Iraq. The only danger was that the public would catch on to your bullshit and thwart your desire to execute PNAC.

Cheney is a lying sack of sh_t.

Children's prison?

Threat?

Weapons of Mass Destruction?

Cultivate ties with terrorists?

Who the F_CK IS THIS A_SHOLE AND WHY IS HE RUNNING MY COUNTRY???

To paraphrase APOCALYPSE NOW..."I love the smell of flying bullshit in the morning"

... that Iraq was not a danger to the US. There was no way a reasonable person would have apprehended that Iraq would be any kind of danger after sanctions and REAL disarmament rendered him helpless, as they did.

Now we have half our military strength tied down there with NO EXIT STRATEGY, getting shot at from all sides. Field Marshall von Rumsfeld is about to rotate in some National Guard units and a new infantry division that has never seen battle. Yeah. What's next, the draft?

This Iraqi adventure was one of the very biggest fuckups of all time. Up there with Napoleon/Hitler invading Russia.

I heard an expert on NPR say that in order to maintain our current troop strength in Iraq with any kind of reasonable rotation in and out of the country, we would need over 50 divisions. We have 33.

One of the biggest fuckups of all time.

Cheney is so gone (as in, he won't be on the ticket) that he can say whatever he likes.

His only purpose for the illegal *Bush administration is to act as the fundraising advocate in chief.

This man has no soul.

Thanks for the Invisible Dick sighting of the day....

to the Iraqi information officer.

dick cheney makes one want to puke!!

I wonder how it would have played out if we had done things correctly?

...right now, Iraq would still be crawling with very frustrated weapons inspectors. Most of the world would be saying "Enough inspecting, don't you think?" and Bush and Blair would be saying "No, we know the WMD are in there somewhere! Keep looking!"

An amusing little farce compared to the tragedy we are in now.

a bazillion dollars. You can be certain Bush made alot of cash as well via Carlisle. That's what its all about, after all. I'm sure Carlisle is quite busy right now arming the next target.

nt

Cheney lied . Cheney is full of shit.

Dick Cheney doesn't even belong in the same garbage heap as Benedict Arnold.

:smoke:

i cant think of an individual who has ever held office in our government with a worse character than sneering Dick.

Cheney didn't say that he and Bush didn't know the uranium claim was dubious. This was his chance to tell the world that he believed the claim and had been given no evidence that it didn't belong in the SOTU. Cheney didn't say that.

Cheney says is irresponsible.

Nobody said "Ignore Iraq." There just happens to be a huge area between Ignore Iraq and bomb the f*ck out of it.

Cheney is a Dick. Big Time.

MzPIp
:dem:

Go help the Frat Boy look for Saddam's WMDs.

:bounce:

ANd they tried to make it anyway. That is even worse.

solely as someone who remains on Halliburton's payroll.

we were bombing him for 12 years had inspectors all over the place, U2 spy planes, u name it.

sheesh, whaddaya think we are idiots like your pardner :shrug:

nice to hear you have to talk about it on NATIONAL teeVee though :evilgrin:

peace

the death and destruction of us all. We dare not be "irresponsible" any longer. It is our duty, as citizens of this country and of this world, to hand them all pink slips asap.

BTW, that report Unca Dickie uses to buttress his argument for gwaging illegal war against Iraq, also had some other interesting tidbits in it:

In fact, the estimate, completed Oct. 2, shows the intelligence services were much more worried that Hussein might give weapons to al Qaeda terrorists if he were facing death or capture and his regime were collapsing after a military attack by the United States

"Saddam, if sufficiently desperate, might decide that only an organization such as al Qaeda, . . . already engaged in a life-or-death struggle against the United States, could perpetrate the type of terrorist attack that he would hope to conduct," said one key judgment of the estimate. It went on to say that Hussein might decide to take the "extreme step" of assisting al Qaeda in a terrorist attack against the United States if it "would be his last chance to exact vengeance by taking a large number of victims with him."

The declassified sections of the estimate were offered by the White House to rebut allegations that the administration had twisted prewar intelligence on Iraq's nuclear weapons program. The result, however, could be to raise more questions about whether the administration misrepresented the judgments of the intelligence services on another basis for going to war: the threat posed by Hussein as a source of weapons for terrorists.

The estimate's findings also raise concerns about the continuing dangers posed by Hussein, who is in hiding, and the failure to find any of his alleged stocks of chemical and biological weapons. If such stocks exist, a hotly debated proposition, this is precisely the kind of dangerous situation the CIA and other intelligence services warned about last fall, administration officials said.

Article link

This is a fight for our very survival, and we must NOT allow Cheney or his talking points to override the message.

... killing or maiming thousands and thousands of Iraqis for humanitarian reasons???

Throw the biggest liar of them all out there to use all the buzz words in his serious condecending tone makes me want to hurl. God, I hate these people.

What Cheney meant to say was that attacking Iraq was (grossly) irresponsible, and illegal.

The most "irresponsible" thing in the world is to go to war without sufficient proof and kill thousands of innocents and kill American soldiers because you "believe" an eneny might have this or that weapon. That is "irresponsible", Mr. Cheney!

What's odd about the administration's response to YellowCakeGate is that the arguments that they could use to get them off the hook, they aren't using. Namely: "Thank God, there were no weapons of mass destruction. We are sorry that we have mislead you, but we had every reason to assume that it was true and, if not, we couldn't take the risk." Instead, Bush and Cheney are still trying to prove that such weapons did in fact exist. Even when they don't really have to. The only conclusion can be that they were pretty certain that either such weapons didn't exist or that what negligible remnants of chemical, perhaps biological, agents that did find would suffice. Truth goes to the victors.

Following Chee-Knee's "logic," it would have been irresponsible to ignore the terrorist attacks (?) of 9/11 that the junta knew were coming.

Yet that's exactly what they did.

Now, The Dick expects us to believe that we had to attack Iraq because failure to do so would have been "ignoring the Iraq threat."

What about the 9/11 threat, Dickhead?? Why did we ignore that one?

:wtf:
dbt

main salary comes from them, not from We the people. Now, if your cash cow would be in danger of being cooked, wouldn't you be responsible enough to help? Remember: Dick gets 1,000,000 per year from Halliburton. What's this VP thingy paying him? 300,000+electric bills? Lets be serious!

Seriously, it's a crime NOT to indict these people.

It's time don't you think? Not Ken Starr this time!

http://www.antiwar.com/orig/leopold11.html
CIA Probe Finds Secret Pentagon Group Manipulated Intelligence on Iraqi Threat
by Jason Leopold
July 25, 2003

(snip)
Moreover, the agents said the Office of Special Plans routinely rewrote the CIA's intelligence estimates on Iraq's weapons programs, removing caveats such as "likely," "probably" and "may" as a way of depicting the country as an imminent threat. The agents would not identify the names of the individuals at the Office of Special Plans who were responsible for providing the White House with the wrong intelligence. But, the agents said, the intelligence gathered by the committee sometimes went directly to the White House, Cheney's office and to Rice without first being vetted by the CIA.

In cases where the CIA's intelligence wasn't rewritten the Office of Special Plans provided the White House with questionable intelligence it gathered from Iraqi exiles from the Iraqi National Congress, a group headed by Ahmad Chalabi, a person whom the CIA has publicly said is unreliable, the CIA agents said.

More than a dozen CIA agents responsible for writing intelligence reports for the agency told the former CIA agents investigating the accuracy of the intelligence reports said they were pressured by the Pentagon and the Office of Special Plans to hype and exaggerate intelligence to show Iraq as being an imminent threat to the security of the U.S.

The White House has been dogged by questions for nearly a month on whether the intelligence information it had relied upon was accurate and whether top White House officials knowingly used unreliable information to build a case for war. The furor started when President Bush said in his January State of the Union address that Iraq had tried to purchase uranium ore from Africa. Bush credited British intelligence for the claims, but the intelligence was based on forged documents. The Office of Special Plans is responsible for advising the White House to allow Bush to use the uranium claims in his speech, according to Democratic Senators and a CIA agent who are privy to classified information surrounding the issue. (snip)

How could any responsible leader have ignored the Iraqi threat?"

There was no "threat" to ignore.

"If we had not acted, the torture chambers would still be in operation, the prison cells for children would still be filled, the mass graves would still be undiscovered," Cheney said.


How about you answer this question, DICK; Please explain your statement above in regard to your INACTION in Liberia.

Notice how he is trying to make it sound as if we went into Iraq to "liberate" the people?

"At a safe remove from the danger, some are now trying to cast doubt upon the decision to liberate Iraq," Cheney said.

Oh yeah, Bunkerboy should know all about a "safe remove from the danger", talk about the pot calling the kettle black!

Cheney needs to be sent over to the frontlines ASAP, that way he can put his money where his mouth is.

Typical Repuke garbage at its finest. :puke: