« The Cuba Factor | Main | Drunk Driving » Cheney Flashback16 Aug 2007 12:03 am I overheard this on The Daily Show playing in the room next door, and now Fallows is linking to it, too. I dunno why it seems to have just surfaced today, but check it out: The speaker is Dick Cheney in 1994, pointing out that marching on Baghdad and deposing Saddam Hussein would likely lead to some kind of "quagmire." Comments (37)
Editor & Publisher tells the story of how this video surfaced. It's popping up in lots of places. Andrew linked to it a couple of days ago. 
The link to Fallows doesn't seem to be working.
Cheney is mad.
Stewart interviewed Stephen Hayes (he of the Cheney hagiography) later in the show, and very effectively used this video as a club.
Would that he had, Algernon, would that he had. Oh, you meant metaphorically. Never mind.
Wow, Crooks & Liars had this video three days ago: Talk about...dinosaur media.
You think that's telling? Go to spock.com and search for "George Bush", notice the tag that appears BEFORE President. Then, search for "Karl Rove" and click on "Related People". Ah, the internets are good.
Here's a little info on the video itself:
It does raise the question of "wtf happend to Cheney?". What one sees in that short clip is a Bismarkian realist: Iraq is not worth the bones of one US marine. Why is a man who, unlike republican lawmakers, clear seem to understand the problems of statebuilding in the middle east get seduced do what he has done for the last 7 years. The mind boogles
They drugged me with LSD.
Wow. Jon Stewart is such a lethal debater - cordial but cutting all at the same time. Even though he has the advantage of being the host, I still cannot recall many scenarios where he has objectively lost against an opponent. I recall one time when he owned Hitchens who, say what you like about his politics on Iraq, is one of the finer orators on American television. He got Hayes pretty good, too, even though a man who thinks we "need more Cheney" is not standing on the steadiest branch of the tree. Predictably, Hayes explained the video with that "9/11 changed everything" theme. Jon Stewart pegged him perfectly, asking how 9/11 changed the fact that Iraq was a sectarian society. (or something to that effect). All in all, good stuff.
I saw that interview in print multiple times before the invasion of Iraq.
He got Hayes pretty good, too Given that Hayes was totally pwn3d the last time, I'm only surprised that he had the shamelessness to go on again and shill his Cheney book. He picked a bad time, too: Stewart was obviously on simmer after John frackin' Gibson's barrel-scraping, and when Hayes claimed that no-one ever got smeared for criticising the war, he got the full boil. As for WTF happened to Cheney, it's a tossup between pump head and the sweet, sweet crack that Norm Podhoretz dealt him
You say "quagmire" like it's a bad thing.
Tomas:What happened is the Cheney realized that an Iraqi war would be a great club to beat your domestic political opposition over the head with. That's all this is about.
I think Karmarkin nails it. You had the dual-loyalty types urging safety for Israel on the one hand and the cynical gangsters wanting to reap the bounty that blood provides on the other. (Not that there weren't blurring between the two camps.) Result: incendiary lies and lots of dead bodies.
What one sees in that short clip is a Bismarkian realist: Iraq is not worth the bones of one US marine. I fully agree: the Cheney in that clip totally knows his s*** and it's frightening, really, that he called the resulting 2003 Iraq invasion to a T. Which brings to mind the issue, all conspiracy weirdness aside: if 1994 Cheney was aware that the "quagmire" was a likely outcome of invasion, and the 2003 Cheney went ahead with it anyway, well, it's not like he would've forgotten the quagmire possibility during the gap of years. So is it plausible that Cheney went from thinking that a quagmire was undesirable in 1994 to thinking that it was desirable? And if so, why is it a good thing now?
I have a theory about Cheney. My stepfather suffered from what the doctors called ICU psychosis.It presents itself after some patients have any kind of heart related procedure requiring sedation. In my Dad's case, he was seeing spiders and frogs in the recovery room. Seemed totally normal otherwise. The docs said the psychosis "should" clear up in a day or two. It never did. For ten long years we dealt with the increasing paranoia. Dad starting keeping the hallucinations to himself, but he was forever changed, locked ina world of suspicion and distrust. Brett Scrowcroft has said he no longer recognizes Cheney as the man he once knew. Personality change? Advanced paranoia and fear? I'm just sayin' with his ticker and all...
Hey, maybe something happened between 1994 and 2003 that caused Cheney to change his mind. What ever could that be?
What ever could that be? Too much time isolated in the "secure undisclosed"?
Al -- Can I take a guess? He became CEO of Halliburton in 1996. Do I win? Ted
Hey, maybe something happened between 1994 and 2003 that caused Cheney to change his mind. Well, whatever happened, it turned out that Cheney's change of mind was wrong-- Iraq still turned out to be a "quagmire" when we took Baghdad in 2003, just as he predicted it would have been had we took Baghdad in 1994.
So, what the hell happened to Dick Cheney? Did 9/11 just fry his brain, or is there evidence that his current dementia began before that event occurred? It seems like, here we have clear evidence of a major figure within the Administration that knew well in advance what the consequences of an ouster of Saddam Hussein would be. Anyone who talks about how the disintegration of Iraq was only obvious in hindsight need look no further than this interview, conducted nearly a decade before the Iraq War. Andrew Sullivan, for instance, who tries to console himself over his original pro-war stance by assuming that all the anti-war folks just happened to be right on accident, and that no one could have foreseen the consequences of an invasion in advance. This is so fucking insane. I think I am supposed to be unsurprised by this, that the cynicism gland in my brain, if working properly, should shield me from shock, but it's not doing it's job for some reason.
Jon Stewart is such a lethal debater - cordial but cutting all at the same time. Well, sort of. Mostly he just abuses his home court advantage in the same way that Hannity, O'Reilly, Beck et al do. I'm completely sympathetic to Stewart's politics and think his guests typically deserve what they get, but I can't help but wince as he gives it to them -- underneath the boyish charm he's not a very polite or gracious host.
Hey, maybe something happened between 1994 and 2003 that caused Cheney to change his mind. What ever could that be? Well, it couldn't have been 9/11. Whatever else you say about 9/11, it couldn't have made an invasion of Iraq less likely to result in a quagmire, could it? [Picture Al jumping off a cliff, holding in his hands a streaming banner saying, "9/11 changed everything!"]
underneath the boyish charm he's not a very polite or gracious host. Examples, please. So we can calibrate if underneath your statement is a concern troll or an actual point.
Hey, maybe something happened between 1994 and 2003 that caused Cheney to change his mind. What ever could that be?
I know, I know, this shouldn't be considered worth responding to, but I want to make sure I understand the chain of logic here: According to Al, invading Iraq was already understood by at least one intelligent, very powerful man to be a snare of violence and lawlessness not seen since Vietnam. And for such a man, if he is a patriotic American, immersing American troops in such a situation is conclusively foolhardy. Do I have it right, Al? Or are you communicating on some deeply profound level that us mere mortals just don't understand?
Oh, enough with the "concern troll" nonsense -- it gets trotted out way too quickly these days. I comment here semi-regularly and am on the goddamn blogroll. I'm not concerned that Jon Stewart's behavior will hurt the left, or his ratings. I just think it's a little impolite. If you need examples, you can look at pretty much any interview Stewart conducts with a a conservative pundit. Take his recent interview with Bill Kristol: Jon was constantly interrupting and talking over his guest. Now, is Bill Kristol a lying scumbag? Yes, of course. But no doubt O'Reilly's fan base feels the same way about his guests. If you ask someone to be a guest you ought to treat them like one -- not like a living effigy for the crowd to boo. I don't know what to call that exactly, but it's ugly. Now, to Stewart's credit he seems to have gotten worse about this as a result of his frustration with the war; perhaps when it's behind us he'll return to his original, more genial style. It also speaks well of him (and Colbert) that he's turned the Daily Show into a more serious platform for discussion than much of cable news. But he's constrained by the format, and ends up pandering to the audience to keep them engaged. I'm sure he'll eventually leave TDS for a different, more serious show, and will probably be able to be a more gracious interviewer when he does. But right now -- man, it's sometimes tough to watch. I'll also note that Colbert seems to take a different tack: he *constantly* shouts his guest down -- he has to in order to stay in character -- until there's one patch where he lets them make their point. It strikes me as a little better, although I'm not sure if the guests feel that way.
Examples, please. he often stomps on replies that sound like they could get interesting, by going for laughs as quickly as he can. yes, i realize it's a comedy show. and many interviews turn out to be 80% him making jokes about the half-dozen sentence fragments the guest manages to get out. he's certainly funny, and i watch him every day, but there sometimes i wish he'd turn it down a notch and let guests finish their thoughts. OT: "concern troll" is just about the least interesting ad hom trick on the blogs.
Stewart's not perfect. cleek nails the problem nicely-- out of boredom or frustration, he sometimes thinks to himself, "screw this, I might as well make a joke and get some laughs." In his defense, I think he was particularly pissed that day because of John Gibson's segment the day (or two?) before, and I think he just wasn't in the mood to talk to someone about the war and dealing with someone who was going to invoke "9/11." The best moment of Stewart's genial style was back in '04 when he got Kristol to say that Bush drove the US "into a ditch" with the Iraq war. The best moments aren't when he "challenges" the guests directly. It's when he gets the guest to say something that he wouldn't say otherwise if he didn't stray off the talking points.
I don't know maybe 19 Americans who died in JiddaH the following year, 19 the year after
Stewart's in the business of getting laughs. Guests know that coming in. Mocking liars and murderous thugs to their face is more genial than I'd allow. In fact, he's extraordinarily polite to them. Everything isn't symmetrical, btw.
Good lord, I just saw the John Gibson mocking Jon Stewart thing on YouTube. Must've been in a cave until now. That is incredibly repulsive and infuriating, even for Fox. What an awful, awful human being.
If you think Gibson's video of Stewart is bad, check out FoxNews's obituary of Kurt Vonnegut that basically said he was a crazy suicidal lefty who wasted his life. "So is it plausible that Cheney went from thinking that a quagmire was undesirable in 1994 to thinking that it was desirable? And if so, why is it a good thing now?" Nixon once told the elder Bush that if the (original) Iraq War had lasted longer, he would have been re-elected. Cheney and Rumsfeld ended up embracing the unitary executive theory after Ford's power was cut down in the wake of Watergate. After Cheney was Secretary of Defense in an administration that successfully fought the first Gulf War yet still lost the election, he probably played the "what if?..." game a lot.
What happened to change Cheney's mind? Two factors mentioned here, plus one that has gone unnoticed. 1. Halliburton -- this job probably flooded him with data on the extent of our abject dependence on oil and with colleagues views on the critical importance of access to Iraqi oilfields as Saudi fields begin drying up. 2. 2002 electoral strategy -- the man who considered further tax cuts "our due" after winning the '02 midterms, probably had to appreciate the advantages of hitting the Dems over the head with a war vote just ahead of the '02 election. But I think this was Karl Rove's main motivation, and only a secondary one for Cheney. 3. AFGHANISTAN! Cheney is not a general -- indeed carefully avoided military service -- and I recall the exact moment when I knew he was going to go too far: he appeared with a smug grin at a press conference just after the Taliban's tactical retreat in early '02 and said "the naysayers said it couldn't be done!" Cheney was completely taken in by the Taliban's tactical retreat, and thought he had just witnessed a miracle of US technological superiority. It WAS after all possible for us to win decisively in a "land war in Asia". So yes 9/11 played a role -- 1) it caused the Administration to activate the Clinton-era contingency plan for attacking Afghanistan, which 2) produced a spectacular *apparent* success, which gulled an armchair general into thinking his earlier arguments (all supplied, no doubt, by Colin Powell, then Chairman of the JCS) were just feeble liberal pessimism. And of course, the Project for a New American Century had been agitating for years to "finish the job" in Iraq. Cheney had sympathy for that reasoning, but needed Afghanistan to persuade him it could work.
Is it impolite to mention that both Gore and Lieberman criticized Cheney for this rationale as late as 2000? It's not that Cheney is the only one to have changed his mind about the wisdom of invading Iraq. Al Gore, among others, has swung pretty wildly on this one too.
Comments closed August 30, 2007. |
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Heads in the Sand
He seems so ... reasonable. Just the kind of foreign policy eminence I'd be tempted to vote for.
Posted by sangfroid826 | August 16, 2007 12:12 AM