Cheney: Iraq is a "Quagmire"

Below is some seriously fucked up video footage of Dick Cheney explaining the difficulty in invading Iraq. In this interview from April 15th, 1994, Cheney reveals the reasons why invading Baghdad and toppling Saddam Hussein wouldn't be a great idea. He also stipulates that "not very many" American soldiers' lives were worth losing to take out Saddam during the Gulf War.

Here's a partial transcript of his interview:

"It's a quagmire if you go that far and tried to take on Iraq. The other thing is casualties. Everyone was impressed with the fact that we were able to do our job with as few casualties as we had. But for the 146 Americans killed in action and their families, it wasn't a cheap war. And the question for the President in terms of whether we went on to Baghdad and took additional casualties in an effort to get Saddam Hussein was 'how many more dead Americans is Saddam worth?' and our judgment was 'not very many' and I think that we got it right."



It's hard to believe that a man as principled as Dick Chaney would have a fundamental change of heart just six short years later after GW was in office. So I guess by "not very many," Chaney misspoke and really meant to say "3,000 more casualties."

And I'm sure it's a total coincidence that the very next year, Cheney -- who had no prior business experience -- left the Department of Defense to become the CEO of Halliburton Co., one of the biggest oil-services companies in the world. Under Cheney's leadership, Halliburton moved up from 73rd to 18th on the Pentagon's list of top contractors. The company garnered $2.3 billion in U.S. government contracts in 1995, which almost doubled the $1.2 billion it earned from the government previously. According to the Center for Public Integrity, under Cheney's leadership the company also received $1.5 billion worth of assistance that year from government-sponsored agencies such as OPIC (Overseas Private Investment Corporation) and the Export-Import Bank, a huge increase compared to the $100 million that the company had received in federal loans and guarantees in the five years prior to Cheney's arrival. Years later, during a vice presidential debate with Joe Lieberman in the 2000 campaign, Cheney increduously asserted that "the government has absolutely nothing to do" with his financial success as chairman of Halliburton Co.

Cheney's integrity can also be seen as Halliburton honorably plead guilty to criminal charges that Halliburton *allegedly* violated a U.S. ban on exports to Libya by selling Col. Qaddafi six pulse neutron generators, devices that can be used to detonate nuclear weapons for which Halliburton paid a stiff $3.8 million penalty to settle the *alleged* violations. Hello, that's almost a FOUR MILLION DOLLAR penalty they had to pay. And you can bet that they learned their lesson and that that would be the last time that Halliburton ever tried to pull anything shady with the U.S. Federal Government ever again.