Former Vice President Dick Cheney refuses to say he made any mistakes at all during his eight years in the Bush administration. He tells me he has no regrets whatsoever.
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Cheney: War Criminal |
During our interview, in short, he was vintage Cheney. He strongly defended his record on every single controversial issue I raised with him: the nearly $1 trillion TARP economic bailout package that the Bush administration pushed through Congress during its final weeks; the decision to invade Iraq even though Saddam Hussein had nothing to do with 9/11; the failure to kill Osama bin Laden when he was cornered in Tora Bora shortly after the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan; and the failure to take any steps in the summer of 2001 when he and President George W. Bush were warned that al Qaeda was planning to attack Americans in the United States.
I pointed out to the former vice president that everyone makes mistakes, and there’s nothing wrong with admitting mistakes. We are, after all, only human. No one is perfect.
But he refused to budge. “I'm proud of the policies we put in place. I think they did the job we intended for them to do. And I'm not inclined to make any mea culpas,” Cheney said. Just as in his new best-seller “In My Time,” Cheney defended every controversial decision he made.
He acknowledged that the intelligence suggesting that Saddam Hussein had stockpiles filled with weapons of mass destruction was wrong. Still, he defended the decision to invade Iraq and remove Saddam from power. His basic argument: the world is better off without Saddam. When I asked him if he had any regrets in Iraq, he said, “I think we made exactly the right decisions.”
On the economy, I pointed out that the Bush administration inherited a strong economy from the Clinton administration. There were robust budget surpluses for as far as the eye could see.
But during the eight years of the Bush administration, those surpluses became deficits. The national debt doubled – going from $5 trillion to $10 trillion. Moreover, the country went into a horrible economic recession in the final months of the Bush administration, teetering on the brink of a depression.
Yet Cheney refused to accept any personal responsibility.
The huge budget deficits were largely the result of no significant spending cuts to pay for two wars, two rounds of tax cuts and a new, unfunded Medicare mandate – prescription drug benefits for seniors.
Cheney: No Regrets
By:
CNN's Ashley Killough When talking about his eight years as vice president, Dick Cheney said he had no regrets from his time working as former President George W. Bush's right-hand man.
"And I'm not inclined to make any mea culpas," Cheney told CNN's Wolf Blitzer in an interview to air on the "Situation Room" Tuesday.
Promoting his new book, "In My Time," a 352-page memoir, Cheney spoke about his four decades in government, the Sept. 11 attacks, and his involvement with the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Cheney had an instrumental role in the decision to send troops to Iraq nearly two years after 9/11. Widespread doubts emerged about the government's initial reason for going to war: suspicions that the country had links to terrorist cells and was harboring weapons of mass destruction.
When asked if the current fatality count of more than 4,000 troops in Iraq, coupled with the hundreds of billions of dollars spent on the war, made it a worthy endeavor, Cheney said "yes.
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"No doubt about it," Cheney said. "When we went in and took down Saddam Hussein, first of all, we got rid of one of the worst dictators in the world.
Cheney added that the takeout of Hussein prompted then-Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi to "cough" up his nuclear materials at the time.
Still talking about the war in Iraq, he later said: "I think we made exactly the right decisions."
"There were a lot of things that came out of what we did in Iraq that were very positive," Cheney said. "We're much better off today with Saddam Hussein gone. We've got Moammar Gadhafi gone. We got a lot done. We didn't get it all done, but we got a lot done.
Cheney has been the target for criticism surrounding the government's interrogation methods of terrorist suspects. He stood by those methods Tuesday, arguing that they prevented another terrorist attack in the United States.
"I think a lot of the most controversial things we did that people didn't like, like the terrorist surveillance program and enhanced interrogation, were things that allowed us to save lives," Cheney said.
He also congratulated President Barack Obama for overseeing the mission that resulted in the death of Osama bin Laden in May. But Cheney added that the Bush administration also deserves credit for the success.
"A lot of the work we did in the intelligence community and special operations forces in that period of time laid that groundwork for the ultimate capturing and killing of Osama bin Laden," Cheney said.
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