NYT : Cheney Returns to a 9/11 Forum for Iraq Defense

Cheney Returns to a 9/11 Forum for Iraq Defense

By DAVID E. SANGER | September 11, 2006

WASHINGTON, Sept. 10 — Vice President Dick Cheney on Sunday backed away from his insistence last year that the insurgency in Iraq was in its “last throes,’’ but in a contentious television interview he said that even if he had known in 2003 that his claims that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction were mistaken, “we’d do exactly the same thing.’’

Mr. Cheney’s appearance on “Meet the Press’’ on NBC was part of the administration’s drive before the fifth anniversary of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks to change the minds of Americans who tell pollsters that they now believe the invasion of Iraq was a misguided diversion in the battle against terrorism.

By the end of the interview he appeared to be preparing the ground for arguments that the country would be far less safe if Republicans lost control of one or both houses of Congress in the November elections.

Mr. Cheney, who is rarely challenged in public, was returning to a forum he used just after the terrorist attacks and just before the Iraq war.

He sounded uncharacteristically defensive at moments, particularly as he tried to explain statements he had made over the past five years about Saddam Hussein’s weapons capabilities and ties to Al Qaeda.

After watching videotape of himself declaring in May 2005 that the level of military conflict in Iraq "will clearly decline" and his now-famous characterization of the insurgents, Mr. Cheney told the program's host, Tim Russert: "I think there’s no question, Tim, that the insurgency has gone on longer and been more difficult than I anticipated. I'll be the first to admit that."

But he defended the invasion of Iraq as being in America's long-term strategic interests. Arguing that "the world is much better off today" with Mr. Hussein in jail, Mr. Cheney said: "Think where we’d be if he was still there. He’d be sitting on top of a big pile of cash, because he’d have $65- and $70-oil. He would by now have taken down the sanctions" imposed by the United Nations. "He would be a major state sponsor of terror. We also would have a situation where he would have resumed his W.M.D. programs."

He also argued that in a decade’s time, "2005 will have been the turning point" in giving Iraqis responsibility for running their country.

Mr. Cheney also struggled to explain his statements, three days before the war began in 2003, that American forces "will, in fact, be greeted as liberators" and that the war was unlikely to become long or costly.

Asked if — more than 2,500 American deaths and 20,000 casualties later — his statement had been "overly rosy," Mr. Cheney responded that he had been correct that the battle to depose Mr. Hussein "was over in a relatively short period of time." But he conceded that "the insurgency has been long and costly and bloody, no question."

He did not answer questions about why the administration had not made adequate contingency plans for the rise of Sunni insurgents or for the outbreak of sectarian war, questions that President Bush has also sidestepped in interviews dating to the 2004 election campaign.

Mr. Cheney appeared to blame the former director of central intelligence, George J. Tenet, for much of the misleading intelligence leading up to the war. But Mr. Cheney did not explain why he had been so dismissive of contrary evidence provided by the International Atomic Energy Agency, whose inspectors re-entered Iraq in 2002, shortly after he had argued that their return would be counterproductive because they would be misled by Mr. Hussein.

Asked on Sunday if the director general of the agency, Mohammed el-Baradei, had been "right about Iraq," Mr. Cheney said: "I haven’t looked at it. I have to go back and look at it again."

Mr. Cheney’s view of the atomic agency’s reliability appears to have changed, however. Asked how, after the failures surrounding Iraq, he could defend the intelligence suggesting that Iran is seeking a nuclear weapon, he noted that the agency's inspectors were in the country, and he called the agency "an international body that, I think, most people wouldn’t question."

Mr. Cheney would not speculate on whether the administration would turn to military force if diplomacy with Iran failed. And he did not directly respond to Mr. Russert's contention that North Korea had built up its nuclear capabilities while the United States focused on Iraq.

Mr. Cheney also declined to be led into a discussion of what he intended in 2003 when he wrote a note to I. Lewis Libby Jr., then his chief of staff, on the margin of a copy of an Op-Ed article in The New York Times written by Joseph C. Wilson IV. In the article, Mr. Wilson accused the administration of manufacturing reports that Mr. Hussein had sought uranium in Africa.

The note, in Mr. Cheney’s hand, read "or did his wife send him on a junket?"

Mr. Cheney would not say if he had asked Mr. Libby to talk to reporters about Mr. Wilson or his wife, Valerie, then a C.I.A. officer, whose exposure became the focus of a long investigation. Last week, Richard L. Armitage, the former deputy secretary of state and no ally of Mr. Cheney's, said he had been the inadvertent source of the leak of Ms. Wilson's name.

"I've said all I'm going to say on the subject, Tim," Mr. Cheney repeated three times, explaining he could be called as a witness in the perjury case against Mr. Libby, which resulted from the inquiry.

Mr. Cheney was also asked about an article in The Times on Sunday citing reports from his associates that his influence in the administration had weakened.

Saying he had not "read the story in any great detail," Mr. Cheney, who had declined to be interviewed for the article, said, "It looks like one of those thumbsuckers that’s done periodically," adding, "It's probably as valid as the ones that were done saying I was in charge of everything."

On a less political topic, he said he would hunt again, despite the accident this year in which he shot a good friend.

"Should I be relieved you didn't bring your shotgun today?" Mr. Russert asked with a smile.

"I wouldn’t worry about it," Mr. Cheney responded. "You're not in season."