1994: "Invading Baghdad would create Quagmire"

Wondering who made that seemingly psychic prediction? Well the answer may surprise you, it was one of the principle authors of the Iraq War: Vice President Dick Cheney! In an interview with the American Enterprise Institure in '94, Dick Cheney had this to say,

"If we go go Baghdad it would be us all alone, it would be a U.S. occupation of Iraq....When you take down Saddam's government, what are you going to put in its place? Thats a very volatile part of the world and if you take down the central government of Iraq, you can easily start seeing pieces fly off. Syria and Iran would want to claim parts of Iraq....Another thing is casualties....(in the Gulf War the deaths of soldiers was limited)..but for their families it was too much. The question is how many dead Americans is Saddam worth and the answer is not too many."

Wow, this interview actually shocked me. Dick Cheney actually knew what would happen if we invaded Iraq. So why did America do it? What a difference a decade makes. I agree with everything he said in this interview, so why did he and the President lie to the American people and Congress in order to get this war started? Why did they so strongly put forth the need for us to go into Iraq? They lied about Weapons of Mass Destruction, they lied about al-Qaeda in Iraq, and they lied about Saddam Hussein being involved in 9/11. Maybe if Dick Cheney told the truth to Congress, Congress wouldn't have authorized this War. Maybe if Cheney would have told the American people the truth there wouldn't have been wide-spread support for this war. But a maybe is just a maybe, and now we are in this war and neither Cheney nor Bush want to get us out. They continue to lie to us, with Bush recently saying, "the same people who attacked us on 9/11 are in Iraq." Another blatant lie. The 9/11 hijackers were Saudis. Al-qaeda is based in Afghanistan. If Bush and Cheney truly wanted to get who attacked us on 9/11, and I believe they should, why did we take our eye of Afghanistan where bin-Laden and al-Qaeda was and go into Iraq? We could have found bin-Laden and broken up al-Qaeda by now, but instead we are in the middle of an Iraqi civil war. And now we are at greater risk than ever before of another terrorist attack because bin-Laden and al-Qaeda have been able to reform in Pakistan. Bush and Cheney are right on one thing, Iraq does have something to do with national security, but not as they say. The longer we stay in Iraq, the less safe we are here in America, because the longer we're there, the less time we're spending fighting the islamic extremists who want us dead!