Dick Cheyney 1994

[lazarus]

I guess the video might be fake!!!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6BEsZMvrq-I

[Dr. Shane]

I don't think it is a fake and it pretty much refutes those that claim the Bush Administration didn't know what they were getting into. They did know. However in the shadow of 9/11 and with Saddam posing a new threat of supporting terrorists with WMDs, the issues had changed from post-Gulf War 1. The tragedy is that they didn't know the intelligence was bad.

[lazarus]

I don't think many people have said they didn't know what the challenges where. On the contrary the most serious charge against the Administration is that they were aware of the the difficulty and ignored good counsel.

Dick Cheney obviously knew the challenges but in the ideologically driven world of Neo-Conservatism facts that don't match the agenda are discarded. This is the only way to make sense of the disasterous foreign policy of this Administration.

Here's are two gems from Bill Kristol.

"I think there's been a certain amount of........... a kind of pop sociology in America, that, you know, somehow the Shia can't get along with the Sunni, or the Shia in Iraq just want to establish some kind of fundamentalist regime. There's almost no evidence of that at all. Iraq has always been very secular."

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1215563

Bill Kristol last month.....

It's of course true that Hamas--an arm of the Sunni Muslim Brotherhood--is at odds ideologically with Shia Iran, and that Shia and Sunni seem inclined to dislike, even slaughter, each other elsewhere in the Middle East.

http://weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/012/433fwbvs.asp

[Dr. Shane]

The liberal mantra has, for a long time, charged that this Administration thought Iraq would be a cake walk. It seems that is simply not true.

[lazarus]

Quote:

The liberal mantra has, for a long time, charged that this Administration thought Iraq would be a cake walk. It seems that is simply not true.

"Liberating Iraq would be a cakewalk." Adelman

"I believe demolishing Hussein's military power and liberating Iraq would be a cakewalk.” Adelman

"I think it'll go relatively quickly, …Weeks rather than months." Cheney

I can't tell you exactly how many days or how many weeks. But by

historical standards, this will be a short war. Pearl

"My belief is we will, in fact, be greeted as liberators. . . . I think it will go relatively quickly, . . . [in] weeks rather than months." Cheney

"The idea that it's going to be a long, long, long battle of some kind I think is belied by the fact of what happened in 1990," he said on an Infinity Radio call-in program. "Five days or five weeks or five months, but it certainly isn't going to last any longer than that." Rumsfeldt