… in 1994, at least.

The Weekly came across this video on YouTube today, and we’re not yet sure whether the resulting nausea was from embarrassment of finding it four years too late or astonishment over its contents. In the video, Dick Cheney (then-citizen, former defense secretary and future vice president) explains why invading Iraq and toppling Saddam Hussein would have been a disastrous undertaking in the first Iraq war, and his reasoning seems prescient for the second. Our Arab allies would have abandoned us, he says. The United States would have been in Iraq alone. Once Hussein was out of power, the United States would have to hold together a country trying to tear itself in three. It would be a “quagmire,” he said. Yes, he used the term quagmire, and none of that “greeted-as-liberators” bunk. Finally, invading Iraq wouldn’t be worth the casualties, Cheney argued.

“The question for the president, in terms of whether we went on the Baghdad and took additional casualties in an effort to get Saddam Hussein, was how many additional dead Americans is Saddam worth,” Cheney said. “And our judgment was not very many and I think we got it right.”

The bug in the lower left-hand corner indicates that the interview was with the American Enterprise Institute, a traditionally neoconservative think tank. We can’t vouch for the source of the video, but the question seems to be within context and the answer speaks for itself.

— Kyle Whitmire