The following headline was in the New York Times, not The Onion, but you would be excused for making the mistake.
How could he possibly make this argument? Check it out, it's a true masterpiece of absurdity...
- The report states that Saddam was trying to get international sanctions lifted from Iraq.
- Cheney asserts that if those sanctions had been lifted, "he [Saddam] had every intention of going back" to his weapons program. This, of course, is pure speculation. Speculation on top of a speculation.
- Thus, if the sanctions had been lifted, and then if Saddam had gone back to his weapons program, there is a chance he could have had dangerous weapons in, say, 5-10 years.
- Therefore, we had no choice but to invade immediately.
Clear as an unmuddied lake, no? I mean, really, what choice did we have? Were we supposed to just sit around, hoping that the sanction wouldn't be lifted and Saddam wouldn't go back to developing weapons that there was no evidence he had any intention of using against us or supplying to terrorists? Could we just sit on our hands while the slim possibility of those events taking place in the next decade existed? What of the children?
Cheney in August, 2002, in a speech to the VFW.
