The Command Post - 2004 US Presidential Election

September 29, 2004

Cheney | Will the Flip-Flop Boomerang?

The SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER is reporting that Cheney has changed his position on Iraq:

In an assessment that differs sharply with his view today, Dick Cheney more than a decade ago defended the decision to leave Saddam Hussein in power after the first Gulf War, telling a Seattle audience that capturing Saddam wouldn’t be worth additional U.S. casualties or the risk of getting “bogged down in the problems of trying to take over and govern Iraq.”
Cheney, who was secretary of defense at the time, made the observations answering audience questions after a speech to the Discovery Institute in August 1992, nearly 18 months after U.S. forces routed the Iraqi army and liberated Kuwait.
. . . .
Last week, Cheney attacked Kerry for his alleged inconsistencies. “Senator Kerry … said that under his leadership, more of America’s friends would speak with one voice on Iraq. That seems a little odd coming from a guy who doesn’t speak with one voice himself. By his repeated efforts to recast and redefine the war on terror and our operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, Senator Kerry has given every indication that he lacks the resolve, the determination and the conviction to prevail in the conflict we face.”
Cheney’s office did not respond to requests for comment about his 1992 statements, nor did the White House. The Bush-Cheney re-election campaign, also asked about the 1992 statements, did not respond.

The trascript was discovered by Seatle Post-Intelligencer columnist Joe Connelly, who wrote in his “In the Northwest” column today entitled Bush-Cheney flip-flops cost America in blood:

The Bush-Cheney campaign has gleefully labeled John Kerry a flip-flopper. But what of Bush-Cheney flip-flops? They’re getting a lot less ink, but America is paying a price in blood.
Little noticed, and worthy of lengthy consideration, is a speech delivered by then-Defense Secretary Dick Cheney in 1992 to the Discovery Institute in Seattle.
The words of our future vice president — defending the decision to end Gulf War I without occupying Iraq — eerily foretell today’s morass. Here is what Cheney said in ‘92:
“I would guess if we had gone in there, I would still have forces in Baghdad today. We’d be running the country. We would not have been able to get everybody out and bring everybody home.
“And the final point that I think needs to be made is this question of casualties. I don’t think you could have done all of that without significant additional U.S. casualties. And while everybody was tremendously impressed with the low cost of the (1991) conflict, for the 146 Americans who were killed in action and for their families, it wasn’t a cheap war.
“And the question in my mind is how many additional American casualties is Saddam (Hussein) worth? And the answer is not that damned many. So, I think we got it right, both when we decided to expel him from Kuwait, but also when the president made the decision that we’d achieved our objectives and we were not going to go get bogged down in the problems of trying to take over and govern Iraq.”

John Edwards imediately picked up on this in a speach today in West Virginia. From the New York Times:

Edwards Says Bush Administration of Botching Iraq Plans
Seizing on a published report that Vice President Dick Cheney had warned of getting “bogged down” in Iraq 12 years ago, Senator John Edwards today accused the Bush administration of botching plans for occupying Iraq and made clear it would be a topic during presidential debates.
“He knew — that’s the worse part about this — he knew how dangerous this was,” Mr. Edwards told a crowd here. “They knew that there were enormous predictors of what would be happening there and they still didn’t have a plan even though they knew what might be coming.”

San Francisco Chronical reporter Marc Sandalow takes an indepth look at Bush’s evolving rhetoric regading the Iraq war.

Record shows Bush shifting on Iraq war
President Bush portrays his position on Iraq as steady and unwavering as he represents Sen. John Kerry’s stance as ambiguous and vacillating.
“Mixed signals are the wrong signals,” Bush said last week during a campaign stop in Bangor, Maine. “I will continue to lead with clarity, and when I say something, I’ll mean what I say.”
Yet, heading into the first presidential debate Thursday, which will focus on foreign affairs, there is much in the public record to suggest that Bush’s words on Iraq have evolved — or, in the parlance his campaign often uses to describe Kerry, flip-flopped.
An examination of more than 150 of Bush’s speeches, radio addresses and responses to reporters’ questions reveal a steady progression of language, mostly to reflect changing circumstances such as the failure to discover weapons of mass destruction, the lack of ties between Iraq and the al Qaeda terrorist network and the growing violence of Iraqi insurgents.
. . . .
Yet a close look at the record makes it difficult to support Bush campaign chairman Ken Mehlman’s description of the upcoming debate as a “square-off between resolve and optimism versus vacillation and defeatism.”
A careful reading of Bush’s statements on Iraq reveals many instances of consistency, just as The Chronicle’s examination of Kerry’s words found consistency in the Democratic challenger’s statements. Over and over, Bush stated that the tragedy of Sept. 11, 2001, changed the way Americans — including the commander in chief — viewed the threat of terrorism and lowered the threshold of risk Americans were willing to accept.
. . . .
Prior to the March 2003 invasion of Iraq, Bush focused on weapons of mass destruction and stated the U.S. goal in straightforward terms.
“Should we have to go in, our mission is very clear: disarmament. And in order to disarm, it would mean regime change,” Bush said at a news conference two weeks before he took the nation to war.
“And our mission won’t change,” Bush continued. “Our mission is precisely what I just stated.”
Six weeks later, speaking to workers at an Army tank plant in Ohio, the goal seemed to expand.
“Our mission — besides removing the regime that threatened us, besides ending a place where the terrorists could find a friend, besides getting rid of weapons of mass destruction — our mission has been to bring humanitarian aid and restore basic services and put this country, Iraq, on the road to self- government.”

Read the rest of the news analysis here.

Posted by Todd Castleton at September 29, 2004 06:27 PM | TrackBack

Comments

Todd,

You have no clue what a flip flop is, do you?

Type key is screwing up again

Posted by: jones at September 29, 2004 08:31 PM

Clearly, in 20/20 hindsight, our failure to remove Saddam in ‘91 was a mistake, one that led directly to the current war. Still, to be fair, one has to consider several things before calling this a flip-flop, or even a bad choice.

For starters, the ‘91 war was a “diplomatic” war, a war with a broad international coalition whose goal wasn’t victory over the enemy (the overthrow of Saddam), but merely the removal of Saddam’s forces from Kuwait.

Moreover, easily 60% of the ground forces in ‘91 were from Jordan, Sudan, Egypt, Turkey, and even Syria(!). As the last of the Iraqi invading forces were leaving Kuwait, the Arab coalition made it clear to the other allies and the US in particular that overthrowing Saddam wasn’t part of the deal and that they would not participate in any such adventure. If Saddam were to be overthrown, ironically we would have had to do it with a “coalition” that would have been quite similar to the one we have today, only then we also had to worry about the possibility of Arab coalition members turning they’re guns on us in the defense of a brother Arab nation.

And finally, Cheney wasn’t the Vice President in 1991, he was the Secretary of Defense. His boss, George Herbert Walker Bush was a true-believing Wilsonian who bought lock, stock and barrel the entire multilateralist model of “diplomatic” war. As a mere cabinet member, it wouldn’t have been appropriate for Cheney to stake a position different from his boss. For a cabinet member, the appropriate method of dissention is resignation.

And lastly, to be honest with ourselves, we have to confront the reality that most of what we’ve ever learned about Saddam we only learned after 1991 as he engaged the UN under the auspices of the agreements and resolutions imposed upon him. Even though during the nineties it became absolutely clear virtually every politician in the US that Saddam had no intention of complying with the demands of the international community, but it still took 9/11 to force us to realize that the danger Saddam posed to the US wasn’t acceptable by any intelligent analysis.

:jackson

Posted by: jackson zed at September 29, 2004 08:57 PM

Third time’s the charm. TypeKey requires a little persistance.

Anyway, it would be a little unreasonable to think that conditions had remained totally unchanged in a period of 12 years.
I too bought the Wilsonian plan - that the UN should have been given the chance. It was worth a try. But they failed, conspicuously, and had been given over a decade to get their act together. OK, go to plan B, assemble a Coalition of the Willing, and go in with the UN’s assent, even if th UN per se wasn’t able to do anything itself.

Posted by: aebrain at September 29, 2004 09:31 PM

It is dishonest for CP to post political propaganda from a web site and represent it as “news analysis.” You might just as well post material from the Bush/Cheney web site or, as in this case, the Kerry/Edwards web site.

Having posted here before under the comments section, Todd’s pro Kerry views are well known. In fact, many of his past postings have come straight from the Kerry/Edwards web page.

These current “comments” from Todd’s website are clearly biased and do not represent news or information. They are merely more of the same Democrat/Liberal/Kerry talking points.

Posted by: Jim at September 30, 2004 08:41 AM

Jones:

We’ve been around this issue before, and I disagree with your definition. You think flip flop is being on both sides of an issue; the term has been used by the Bush campaign to describe a changing of position as well. So you are arguing semantics not substance.

Jackson Zed and AEBrain:

Well done on arguing the substance. Most who post comments fail to address the issues squarely. But it sounds like a whole lot of nuance and line drawing to me.

Jim:

Some cheese with your whine? Are you seriously suggesting that no one has ever posted pro-Bush propaganda on this page? propaganda: publicity intended to spread ideas or information that will persuade or convince people. Oxford American Dictionary at 536.

How many times have you criticized persons for posting links to the Drudge report? You criticize the posting of the entire transcript of the love fest between O’Reilly and Bush? Have you ever criticized a pro-Bush posting as being biased, much less criticized the poster for being biased? Your moral indignation (allegations of “dishonesty”) lack credibility.

You also need to be more precise. Yes, when I have commented on postings, I have included items from Kerry’s website because the topic was Kerry’s position on the issue. But I have not posted items from Kerry’s website as news items. I tend to stick to newspapers. And in my posting I identified which information was presented by the source as news, a column, or news analysis.

Posted by: Todd at September 30, 2004 12:09 PM

Grow up, Todd.

Posted by: Jim at September 30, 2004 12:33 PM

Todd, are you defending the use of TCP as a means to spread propoganda?

You don’t really need someone to tell you why the partial transcript of the o’reilly-Bush ‘lovefest’ is newsworthy (on par with a kerry-sawyer interview that should be here too, or even kerry-regis), and why only the NYT link is the only link of the four you gave that merits consideration as ‘news’, do you?

The analysis and commentary of Connelly and Sandalow are not news. They may contain factual information, but they are editorials. They go beyond presentation of information and go into presentation of conclusions. The jury here doesn’t need, or want, closing arguments. To present those three links and pass them off as news since you didn’t write it is disingenuous. A better analogy would have been if TCP had a stream of Limbaugh or Coulter articles that it referenced.

Incidentally, it’s my opinion that this is where the Atlantic Monthly also piece failed to meet the typical standards that I’ve come to expect as a reader of this site.

Posted by: waffletromper at September 30, 2004 02:40 PM

And I guess I don’t understand what the problem would be if you did post things from Kerry’s site. It may be the clearest presentation of his views available to us, since you can’t depend on him stay on point anywhere else. And it was his site, after all, that briefly posted papers during his military service and the the ‘V’ for his bronze star…

Posted by: waffletromper at September 30, 2004 02:58 PM

Where has it been used as an honest change of mind? It is in no ways a change of mind.

I do dig a liberal talking to me about semantics.

I did address the substance, you have no clue what the heck you are talking about. Or, as Jim says, you are just spewing propoganda.

Posted by: jones at September 30, 2004 06:05 PM

Where has it been used as an honest change of mind? It is in no ways a change of mind.

On the official Bush Cheney web site:

Friday, April 16, 2004
John Kerry’s Flip Flops
Flip Flopped On Trade With China

In 1991, Kerry Supported Most-Favored Trade Status For China. “Sen. John Kerry said yesterday that he is breaking party ranks to support most-favored-nation trade status for China … ‘I think the president has some strong arguments about some of the assets of most-favored-nation status for China,’ Kerry said.” (John Aloysius Farrell, “Kerry Breaks Party Ranks To Back China Trade Status,” The Boston Globe, 6/15/91)

In 2000, Kerry Voted In Favor Of Permanent Normal Trade Relations With China. (H.R. 4444, CQ Vote #251: Passed 83-15: R 46-8; D 37-7, 9/19/00, Kerry Voted Yea)

Now Kerry Criticizes The Bush Administration For Trading With China. “Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry said on Monday Americans workers were paying the price for President Bush’s weak stance on trade with China and other countries. … On the bus tour, Kerry singled out the Bush administration’s handling of trade with China and said that country was manipulating its currency.” (Caren Bohan, “Kerry Pledges Aggressive Trade Stance,” Reuters, 4/26/04)

Here is what Kerry actually said:

“One day after George Bush refused to crack down on China’s illegal currency manipulation, we learn that our trade deficit with China has set a new record, jumping 28 percent in the last year. George Bush has taken America in the wrong direction, moving from too little, too late on China to doing nothing at all. I will take America in the right direction by enforcing our trade agreements, ending China’s illegal currency manipulation, cutting our budget deficit, and restoring America’s technological edge.”

Kerry is alleged to have changed his mind and therefore flip-floped, notwithstanding a change in circumstances (China manipulating its currency) which seem to have excused the Cheney flip-flop in this post. And the Bush campaign posted this on their website as an exemplary Kerry flip-flop.

But this really isn’t a flip-flop at all because, like so much of the moronic Bush campaign rhetoric, they equate Kerry being against the manner Bush executes policy with the policy itself. Kerry didn’t change his mind on most favored status for China in this quote, he said we need to enforce our trade agreements, which Bush is not doing. Like so much of the Bush rheoric, this alleged flip-flop is just plain false.

Apparently you don’t know what you are talking about, Jones.

Posted by: Todd at October 1, 2004 10:55 AM

type key is at it.

For 8 years China was cool. Then it is suddenly bad to trade with? What changed from Clinton to Bush? Why complain in 2001? Oh Bush is doing the policy now? Flip flop.

Hide behind your “manner of execution” fig leaf if you want, but the view we get is nasty.

Posted by: jones at October 1, 2004 04:42 PM