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09/29/2004: "Cheney's Alleged Flip-Flop"

It seems that I can't post replies at Command Post (the cookie "commenter_name" from "www.command-post.org" disappears prematurely), so I'll post my replies here for now.

In the post Will the Flip-Flop Boomerang?, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer quotes the Vice President as saying "I would still have forces in Baghdad today.... [H]ow many additional American casualties is Saddam (Hussein) worth? And the answer is not that damned many." Senator Edwards says that "[Vice President Cheney] knew — that’s the worse part about this — he knew how dangerous this was," "They knew that there were enormous predictors of what would be happening there and they still didn’t have a plan even though they knew what might be coming."

For the record, I believe that we should have toppled Saddam back then. But I don't find the Vice President's comments to be damning. The Vice President was correct in 1992; it has been costly to evict Saddam; it is costly to introduce democracy to Iraq.

The major differences are 9/11 in particular, the general rise of global terrorism, and the general proliferation of WMD technology. The cost of inaction has risen greatly. We can no longer afford to blow up tents every time an embassy is attacked. We can no longer afford to trade oil for palaces. It is now much more obvious that we need to shackle terrorism. It is now much more obvious that we need to defund terrorists. It is now much more obvious that Saddam had to go.