In a much-anticipated Sunday showdown between Vice President Joe Biden and his predecessor Dick Cheney, Biden has drawn first blood.
Asked to respond to a range of harsh attacks on the Obama administration leveled by Cheney, Biden first gathered himself. "Let me choose my words carefully here," he told David Gregory in a pre-taped interview for Sunday's "Meet the Press."
Then Biden let loose with several minutes of his most pointed criticism of Cheney since the 2008 presidential campaign, when Biden claimed that Cheney had "done more harm than any other single elected official in memory in terms of shredding the Constitution."
Speaking to Gregory, Biden charged at least four times that Cheney was "rewrit history" with his recent attacks, and declared that President Obama has amassed a success rate in countering terrorism that "exceeds anything that occurred in the last Administration."
~snip~
Video at Link:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/02/14/joe-biden-dick-cheney-meet-press_n_461717.htmlCheney Responding:
~snip~
Responding to Biden’s comments that Iraq may end up being one of the Obama administration’s greatest success, Cheney chuckled. “I guess I shouldn’t be surprised by my friend Joe Biden,” he said.
“I’m glad he now believes Iraq is a success,” Cheney said. “For them to try and take credit for what has happened in Iraq strikes me as a little strange. … So if they are going to take credit for – fair enough – for what they’ve done while they're there – but it ought to go with a healthy dose of ‘thank you George Bush’ up front. And a recognition that some of their early recommendations with respect to prosecuting that war were just dead wrong.”
“I believe very deeply in the proposition that what we did in Iraq was the right thing to do,” Cheney said. “We got rid of one of the worst dictators of the 20th century.”
~snip~
Watch the exchange HERE:
http://blogs.abcnews.com/thenote/2010/02/cheney2.htmlAnd while we're on the subject of Cheney and Iraq, I'm not sure this has ever been posted before, but it is an interesting bit of info, imho. From a Democracy Now interview, Amy Goodman interviewing Craig Unger (author of House of Bush, House of Saud) back in 2007:
Investigative journalist Craig Unger joins us now in Washington. He is the author of the new book “The Fall of the House of Bush: The Untold Story of How a Band of True Believers Seized the Executive Branch, Started the Iraq War, and Still Imperils America’s Future.” The book examines how neoconservatives secretly forged an alliance with the Christian Right during the Bush presidency and helped make the case for war in Iraq.
~snip~
AMY GOODMAN: As we talk about how President Bush and Vice President Cheney made the case for war in Iraq, I want to turn to comments made by Dick Cheney in September of 1992. At the time, he was President George H.W. Bush’s Secretary of Defense. During an address at the Economic Club of Detroit, Cheney was asked why the United States didn’t bury Saddam Hussein during the Gulf War. This is how he responded close to fifteen years ago.
DICK CHENEY: At the end of the war in the Gulf, when we made the decision to stop, we did so because we had achieved our military objectives—that is, when we decided to halt military operations. Those objectives were twofold: to liberate Kuwait and, secondly, to strip Saddam Hussein of his offensive military capability, of his capacity to threaten his neighbors. And we had done that.
There is no doubt in my mind, but what we could have gone on to Baghdad and taken Baghdad, occupied the whole country. We had the 101st Airborne up on the Euphrates River Valley about halfway between Kuwait and Baghdad. And I don’t think, from a military perspective, that it would have been an impossible task. Clearly, it wouldn’t, given the forces that we had there.
But we made a very conscious decision not to proceed for several reasons, in part because as soon as you go to Baghdad to get Saddam Hussein, you have to recognize that you’re undertaking a fairly complex operation. It’s not the kind of situation where we could have pulled up in front of the presidential palace in Baghdad and said, “Come on, Saddam. You’re going to the slammer.” We would have had to run him to ground. A lot of places he could have gone to hide out or to resist. It would have required extensive military forces to achieve that.
But let’s assume for the moment that we would have been able to do it, we got Saddam now and maybe we put him down there in Miami with Noriega. Then the question comes, putting a government in place of the one you’ve just gotten rid of. You can’t just sort of turn around and away; you’ve now accepted the responsibility for what happens in Iraq. What kind of government do you want us to create in place of the old Saddam Hussein government? You want a Sunni government or a Shia government, or maybe it ought to be a Kurdish government, or maybe one based on the Baath Party, or maybe some combination of all of those.
How long is that government likely to survive without US military forces there to keep it propped up? If you get into the business of committing US forces on the ground in Iraq to occupy the place, my guess is I’d probably still have people there today, instead of having been able to bring them home.
We would have been in a situation, once we went into Baghdad, where we would have engaged in the kind of street-by-street, house-to-house fighting in an urban setting that would have been dramatically different from what we were able to do in the Gulf, in Kuwait in the desert, where our precision-guided munitions and our long-range artillery and tanks were so devastating against those Iraqi forces. You would have been fighting in a built-up urban area, large civilian population, and much heavier prospects for casualties.
You would have found, as well, I think, probably the disintegration of the Arab coalition that signed on to support us in our efforts to eject the Iraqis from Kuwait, but never signed on for the proposition that the United States would become some kind of quasi-permanent occupier of a major Middle Eastern nation.
And the final point, with respect to casualties, everybody, of course, was tremendously impressed with the fact that we were able to prevail at such a low cost, given the predictions with respect to casualties in major modern warfare. But for the 146 Americans who were killed in action and for their families, it was not a cheap or a low-cost conflict. The bottom-line question for me was: How many additional American lives is Saddam Hussein worth? The answer: Not very damn many. I think the President got it right both times, both when he decided to use military force to defeat Saddam Hussein’s aggression, but also when he made what I think was a very wise decision to stop military operations when we did.
AMY GOODMAN: That was Dick Cheney, speaking in September of 1992 at the Economic Club of Detroit. Our guest is investigative journalist Craig Unger. Pretty astounding, Craig.
I think it is fair to say Cheney has absolutely no credibility and the fact that he is allowed to ~ invited to (!) ~ parade around on M$M is just a joke.
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