Cheney Only Decided Invading Iraq Was A Good Idea Because He Made Millions Working For Halliburton? Sheer BS

Soros front The Raw Story has posted a clandestine video of Senator Rand Paul from 2009 talking to student Republicans at Western Kentucky University courtesy of far left bottom feeder David Corn of The Nation and other fine quasi-Marxist sites:



Most of the video is about problems with the Patriot Act (and by definition, fuzzy, undeclared wars) that I largely agree with. After that is where it gets interesting.

Assuming the video wasn't selectively edited (always a possibility with these creatures), Rand Paul had a few things to say about Iraq, starting at about 6:40:

There’s a great YouTube of Dick Cheney in 1995 defending [President] Bush Number One [and the decision not to invade Baghdad in the first Gulf war], and he goes on for about five minutes. He’s being interviewed, I think, by the American Enterprise Institute, and and he says it would be a disaster, it would be vastly expensive, it’d be civil war, we would have no exit strategy. He goes on and on for five minutes. Dick Cheney saying it would be a bad idea. And that’s why the first Bush didn’t go into Baghdad. Dick Cheney then goes to work for Halliburton. Makes hundreds of millions of dollars, their CEO. Next thing you know, he’s back in government and it’s a good idea to go into Iraq.

Paul then goes on to describe events following the 9/11 terrorist attack when, then CIA director, George Tenet is told by George W. Bush adviser Richard Perle that the attack had given them reason to invade Iraq, despite the fact that the intelligence had yet to show a connection:

The day after 9/11, [CIA chief] George Tenet is going in the [White] House and [Pentagon adviser] Richard Perle is coming out of the White House. And George Tenet should know more about intelligence than anybody in the world, and the first thing Richard Perle says to him on the way out is, ‘We’ve got it, now we can go into Iraq.’ And George Tenet, who supposedly knows as much intelligence as anybody in the White House says, ‘Well, don’t we need to know that they have some connection to 9/11?’ And, he [Perle] says, ‘It doesn’t matter.’ It became an excuse. 9/11 became an excuse for a war they already wanted in Iraq.

Interesting that Senator Rand Paul would so perfectly parrot the Leftist line here, but if he in fact said it (and remember, this is five years ago and subsequent statements on national defense have shown that his views have broadened since then)it was sheer horse manure then and now.

If he said this, Rand Paul got it wrong on two important points. He's totally correct that Dick Cheney opposed our toppling Saddam during the first Gulf War. Where's he's mistaken is that Cheney somehow changed his views "because of Halliburton". It was Cheney and Rumsfeld who were against invading and occupying Iraq. At most, they wanted a quick, punitive strike. It was Clinton  holdover George tenet,head of the CIA and Colin Powell who pushed the idea of making Iraq 'the model for a Muslim democracy' to Bush '43.

And by the way, the CIA Inspector General's report on CIA head George Tenet's tenure as head of the CIA faults Tenet directly for the failure of intelligence leading up to 9/11 and the period afterwards.

At any rate, after Dubbyah bought the idea of Iraq the model, he put Rumsfeld in charge of implementing it, even though our military wasn't prepared. That's the meaning of Rumsfeld's famous remark, that you go to war with the army you have, not the army you'd like to have. And then Bush made Rumsfeld the scapegoat for his stupidity, having already fired Powell and Tenet.

One source on Rumsfeld's views some of you might find interesting is Brigadier General Mark Scheid, chief of the Logistics War Plans Division after 9/11, and one of the people with primary responsibility for war planning, who was quoted in an interview with journalist Orin Kerr, hardly a right winger, as having been told by Rumsfeld to plan for a war with Iraq, but not to bother planning for a long stay:

"The secretary of defense continued to push on us ... that everything we write in our plan has to be the idea that we are going to go in, we're going to take out the regime, and then we're going to leave," Scheid said. "We won't stay."

Jed Babbin, deputy undersecretary of defense in the George H.W. Bush administration and a noted writer on national security subjects has also weighed in on this topic.

Oh, and Halliburton? Most of those so-called no bid contracts were for things nobody else was even willing to bid on because of their lack of expertise, facilities, equipment or the insurance costs for the risks to their employees in a war zone. Among them was putting out the horrendous fires after Saddam Hussein set the Iraqi oil fields on fire as a parting shot. Every one else said it was impossible to save the oilfields and avoid an ecological disaster, but Halliburton pulled it off. No one else could have.

As for the insurance costs, it was four Halliburton employees who were kidnapped, lynched, had their bodies mutilated and were then hung off the bridge in Falujah by Moqtada al-Sadr's thugs.. not many companies were willing to risk that sort of thing to rebuild Iraq, not that we should have done that in the first place.

Of course, the one huge thing the 'Bush lied, people died' crowd were flat out wrong about was that supposed 'fifteen words' about Saddam Hussein having purchased yellow cake uranium for use in manufacturing nuclear weapons. That uranium was found...and the new Iraqi government sold it to Canada.

I am frankly sick and tired of the maligning and slander of Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney that goes on from both sides of the aisle...especially since it conveniently exonerates the real culprits behind the intel failure of 9/11 and our unfortunate adventure in Iraq.