"How many additional dead Americans is Saddam worth?"-----Dick Cheney, 1994

There's an interesting backstory on what is now being called the "Dick Cheney Quagmire Video." That interview was unearthed quite accidentally by a C-Span staffer named Emmanuel Touhey who was putting together a Cheney marathon (apparently they also show horror movies on that channel).

Anyway, Touhey stumbled across a tape labeled simply "Life and Career of Dick Cheney." He watched part of it (though not the quagmire part) and decided to add it to the pile. The rest, as they say, is history.

If you haven't seen the interview in question, you can find the video under my "Newsflash" post from yestrerday. It's an absolute hoot!! Well, at least until you realize that Cheney decided to answer his own question: 3,666 American lives (and counting).

Newsflash!

In what can only be described as a stunning admission, Dick Cheney has said in an interview that Iraq is a quagmire. Seriously, he really, REALLY said it!!

Well, out of fairness to the Vice President, it's not like he suddenly experienced some sort of epiphany and just now admitted it. No, he actually said it back in 1994. In the interview, Cheney is asked why the United States didn't continue on to Baghdad during the first Gulf War and take out Saddam.

In his response, Cheney says that U.S. forces would have been on their own. And if we were to remove Saddam, who would we put in his place? And without a strong central government, Iraq would quickly frament. Western Iraq would fall under Syrian influence, eastern Iraq would ally itself with Iran, and the Kurds would likely join with the Kurds in Turkey to destabilize that country. The situation, according to Cheney, would have become a "quagmire," and that's why we elected not to invade Iraq.

Too bad Cheney didn't consult himself back in 2003.