Thursday, August 16, 2007
Jon Stewart: Journalist
This video shows Dick Cheney in 1994 stating that going into Baghdad to take out Saddam Hussein would be a terrible thing. The country would likely fracture and there would be chaos. The story has received much play over the past several days, showing how much of a difference a decade makes.
Last night Jon Stewart had on Steven Hayes, the biographer of Cheney, and he asked him to address the issue. Hayes started in with the 9/11 changes everything spiel, but Stewart cut him off. 9/11 did not change the fact that Iraq would be tough to put back together again after Saddam was deposed. Hayes argued that 9/11 did change things, and we had to go in because of WMD no matter what the risk.
This is why Stewart is an excellent journalist. He got to the meat of the subject. Even if "we had" to go in to Iraq, no matter how difficult, that is not what Cheney was saying. He was saying we would be greeted as liberators. The administration was saying it would be cheap, easy, there would be flowers thrown at us. Cheney knew very well that wasn't true.
Even if you give the benefit of the doubt on if the administration believed there were WMDs, but they couldn't prove them, there is no doubt that Cheney lied to the American people about how easy an operation deposing Saddam would be for our country to achieve.
Stewart tells jokes, he is funny, but he has a way of cutting away the extraneous crap and getting to the heart of the matter. Cheney lied.
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