Vice President Dick Cheney is a staunch defender of the U.S. invasion of Iraq to topple Saddam Hussein, but a 1994 video shows he opposed that very move after the liberation of Kuwait, saying it would land America in a "quagmire.”

In an April 15, 1994 interview Cheney said he did not think U.S. or U.N. forces should have moved into Baghdad in 1991, stating, "Because if we'd gone to Baghdad we would have been all alone. There wouldn't have been anybody else with us. There would have been a U.S. occupation of Iraq. None of the Arab forces that were willing to fight with us in Kuwait were willing to invade Iraq. Once you got to Iraq and took it over, took down Saddam Hussein's government, then what are you going to put in its place?

"That's a very volatile part of the world, and if you take down the central government of Iraq, you could very easily end up seeing pieces of Iraq fly off: part of it, the Syrians would like to have to the west, part of it - eastern Iraq - the Iranians would like to claim, they fought over it for eight years. In the north you've got the Kurds, and if the Kurds spin loose and join with the Kurds in Turkey, then you threaten the territorial integrity of Turkey. It's a quagmire if you go that far and try to take over Iraq. The other thing was casualties. Everyone was impressed with the fact we were able to do our job with as few casualties as we had. But for the 146 Americans killed in action, and for their families - it wasn't a cheap war. And the question for the president, in terms of whether or not we went on to Baghdad, took additional casualties in an effort to get Saddam Hussein, was how many additional dead Americans is Saddam worth?"

Now why wasn't this video been released prior to the run up to war, the American public might've had a different view of what we were getting ourselves into in Iraq, rather than the "slam dunk" that was predicted by Rumsfeld.

Different circumstances, at the end of Gulf War 1, most of the experts assumed it would only be a matter of months before Saddam was toppled, by a govt more friendly to the west.

That didnt happen, and an entrenched Saddam, who had a couple of lunatic sons waiting to take over, was getting desperate, his only option was to basically surrender to the west, which would have meant his downfall, or try to take the Kuwaitt and Saudia Arabian oil fields, threatening to destroy them if we interfered again.

But by April 1994, three years after the first Iraq war, it was quite clear to everyone including Cheney that Saddam was not about to be toppled so easily. And yet he continued to justify what was in part his decision not to march on Baghdad in 1991. It's obvious Cheney will say whatever to try to justify whatever decisions he has made and not admit mistakes.

Andrew

Thats like Roosevelt saying in 43, you know, we really should have invaded japan in 40, considering what they did in 41.