Cheney: "I think we clearly are viewed as liberators"

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/11442707/page/3/

Interview with Vice President Dick Cheney
Transcript of exclusive NBC News interview

NBC NEWS EXCLUSIVE
By Kelly O'Donnell
White House Correspondent
NBC News
Updated: 7:43 a.m. ET May 9, 2006

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I’d like to ask you about two of the comments that you have made that have gotten a lot of attention with respect to Iraq. Much has been made about what you said about being greeted as liberators, and about a year ago when you said the insurgency was in its last throes. More recently, you defended that as, “basically accurate.” With all due respect, sir, isn’t that wrong?


Which?

Both of those?

Both of those. No, I think with respect to the question of were we greeted as liberators, I think we clearly are viewed as liberators by the vast majority of the Iraqi people. No question we’ve had problems with a group of terrorist insurgents, but that’s a very small minority. And I really believe that when the history books are written that what we’ll find is that 2005 was the turning year, the watershed year for Iraq operations. Why? Well, primarily because that’s the year which the Iraqis first had an election in January, when they elected an interim government. That’s the year in which they wrote a constitution—the most up-to-date modern constitution in the Arab world. That’s the year when they ratified that constitution, and finally, you had national elections. They had three national elections last year. In their last national election, they turned out by the millions to participate in that process.

And I think when we look back from the perspective of history, we’ll see that that was the turning point, that was the period of time when the Iraqis stepped up and began to take responsibility for their own fate, for their own affairs, developed a political system and put it in place, as well as participated in a major way in the training of their own security forces—now got some 250,000 of them in the field. And that will have been the time when we turned the corner, when—in effect, got on top of the situation in Iraq and will ultimately succeed in completing our mission.

I don’t think you can judge it just day by day, or what’s happened this week, or what happened last week. I do think you need to have some historic perspective on this, and I think if you take a historical perspective on what we’ve done in Iraq, that, in fact, that will have been the watershed year, if you will.

...

Speaking of books, Valerie Plame Wilson has gotten a book contract, the CIA officer who became known through the CIA leak case. Any interest in reading that book?


No, I didn’t read her husband’s book either.