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Dick Cheney. July 2007.

CHENEY: I firmly believe, Larry, that the decisions we've made with respect to Iraq and Afghanistan have been absolutely the sound ones in terms of the overall strategy.

KING: Although there were mistakes.

CHENEY: Oh, sure. Yes. There are always things in war that happen that nobody anticipated, surprises, things that don't go exactly as planned, that's the nature of warfare.

Dick Cheney. April 1991.

I think that the proposition of going to Baghdad is also fallacious. I think if we were going to remove Saddam Hussein we would have had to go all the way to Baghdad, we would have to commit a lot of force because I do not believe he would wait in the Presidential Palace for us to arrive. I think we'd have had to hunt him down. And once we'd done that and we'd gotten rid of Saddam Hussein and his government, then we'd have had to put another government in its place.

What kind of government? Should it be a Sunni government or Shi'i government or a Kurdish government or Ba'athist regime? Or maybe we want to bring in some of the Islamic fundamentalists? How long would we have had to stay in Baghdad to keep that government in place? What would happen to the government once U.S. forces withdrew? How many casualties should the United States accept in that effort to try to create clarity and stability in a situation that is inherently unstable?

I think it is vitally important for a President to know when to use military force. I think it is also very important for him to know when not to commit U.S. military force. And it's my view that the President got it right both times, that it would have been a mistake for us to get bogged down in the quagmire inside Iraq.

I'll add that a lot of people these days are claiming that getting rid of Saddam Hussein was a good idea, but the disaster that is Iraq today is a result of bad decisions and incompetence.

That's crap.

What's most fascinating to me about Mr. Cheney's Nostradamus-like rhetorical questions from 1991 is that he's making the case that taking out Hussein and his government was just a dumb idea, period. Even with the half-million U.S. troops and a true multi-national coalition at the ready back in the day, it was a dumb idea. So to do it on the cheap in 2003 with fewer forces and little to no international support was beyond dumb.

If only they had asked the dumbest soul-rocker in Delmar. Or the 1991 version of one Richard Bruce Cheney.

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