Who Hijacked the Brain of Dick Cheney?

(Crossposted at Welcome to Pottersville.)

We’ve read the transcript of this now-famous interview with Dick Cheney on April 15th, 1994. But it wasn’t until yesterday that the site Grand Theft Country put up the video on Youtube of Cheney explaining how invading Baghdad and imposing regime change would be a bad idea. The cons prohibiting that, said Cheney, were that it would’ve produced a quagmire, we would’ve had to go in unilaterally and what would we have replaced Saddam Hussein’s Baathist government with?

In short, Cheney seems to be raising exactly the same issues that should’ve been seriously addressed by the highest levels of our administration, which includes him, less than a decade later. In fact, in this brief clip, Cheney actually seems… sane and well-informed. And this level-headed stance jibes perfectly with the thoughts of former President George HW Bush (and co-author Brent Scowcroft) when he’d explained why rushing into Baghdad would’ve been a bad idea.

Yet, by January 26th, 1998, four days after the Monica Lewinsky scandal broke, PNAC wrote an infamous letter to President Bill Clinton pleading for him to do the thing that former President George H. W. Bush and former Secretary of Defense Richard B. Cheney had cogently and knowingly warned against doing. The letter, as many of us know, was signed by the likes of Elliot Abrams, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, John Bolton and a whole cast of characters that reads like a current neoconservative Who’s Who, many of whom would be holding key posts in just under three years in the upcoming Bush administration.

So, how did September 11th, 2001 change our entire attitude about Iraq when the administration never produced anything even remotely resembling a shred of evidence that Saddam Hussein or anyone in his Baathist government had anything to do with it, that Saddam had actually gone after Osama bin Laden, a former ally in the Reagan years?

And why did we buy into it?

International politics moves with the speed of light but some things remain eternal, such as the folly of invading a nation, especially on false pretenses, slaughtering its populace under the pretense of “liberating” them and smashing the military, civil and political infrastructure without having a clue or even an inclination as to what we’d replace it with. By late 2001, Donald Rumsfeld, one of the signatories of the PNAC letter, had threatened to fire anyone who’d even mentioned the words “post-war plan” regarding Iraq.

So the question that is uppermost in my mind is, Who hijacked the mind of the man who’s been accused of hijacking the Presidency?