Dany: So one argument I often have with people in Washington is about whether the Iraq war
was a triggering factor.
There's a suggestion that a lot of people like to make...and it's not really a partisan
suggestion, more of an ideological one...that getting rid of Saddam Hussein just sort of
ripped the lid off the Middle East and it was from thence that everything began to domino,
topple regimes, the Arab Spring.
What do you say to that?
Cheney: Well, I say you've got to look back at history.
We had a very serious nuclear proliferation problem in the Middle East that goes back
to 1981.
Long before we did anything vis-à-vis Saddam Hussein but in '81, he had a nuclear program,
the Osirak reactor outside Baghdad.
The Israelis took it out.
When I was secretary of defense in the summer of '90, I was visited by my Israeli counterpart,
the Defense Minister, Moshe Arens, and the Senior Uniformed Officer, Ehud Barak, and
they showed me evidence that Saddam had started up in 1990 a nuclear program again and that
it was pretty far along.
In Desert Storm, we went in, we took out that program.
The IAEA went in afterwards and did an investigation and found out that he was much closer than
we thought to actually having nuclear capability.
This was an independent, international atomic energy agency that went in and checked that.
That's not something the United States came up with and that was before we ever got into
the WMD debate with respect to when we went in in 2003.
It's a long history of Saddam Hussein trying to develop weapons of mass destruction.
The first intelligence report I saw after I got elected vice president in 2000 warned
about Iraq and WMD.
So the activities of Saddam Hussein overwhelmingly created ferment and turmoil and raised the
specter, especially the link between terror on the one hand and weapons of mass destruction
on the other.
He used chemical weapons against thousands of his own people at Halabja in 1988.
I mean, he had a well-established track record that he was a troublemaker and he had invaded
Kuwait before and we did go in with the support of a lot of Democrats in '03 and we achieved
our objective in that we got rid of Saddam Hussein.
That also precipitated other activities.
We found out, for example, that Muammar Qaddafi had a nuclear program and five days after
we captured Saddam Hussein, he surrendered all of his nuclear materials to us.
His centrifuges, uranium feed stock, weapons design.
So the circumstances over there in terms of the problems and the difficulties that were
developing pointed in the direction of what was my biggest fear, which was the possibility
that terrorists would ultimately acquire something far deadlier than airline tickets and box
cutters and would acquire a nuclear weapon or chemicals or a biological agent.
I was quoted in an interview I did about five months before 9/11 that that was out biggest
threat and I think it still is today.
And we've still got a very serious nuclear proliferation problem now that goes back over
30 years.
Dany: Right.
And the Iranians of course are unleashed at this point.
Cheney: The Iranians are unleashed.
Excuse me.
I don't want to spend all your time on the subject, but we had in 1987, Mr. A.Q.
Khan, who put together the Pakistani program in a hotel in Dubai, sold the Iranians the
basic plans for centrifuges for $3 million.
Nineteen eighty-seven.
Dany: Right.
Cheney: We found, of course, on our watch when Meir Dagan showed up, the Israeli head
of Mossad, that Syria had a nuclear reactor that had been built for them by the North
Koreans.
The Israelis took it out in the fall of '07.
What's worked in that part of the world for dealing with the nuclear problem has been
military force or the threat of military force.
And the thing about the Obama Administration is they didn't pursue that option.
Obama wrote it off from the very beginning.
What they did was try to bribe the Iranians into being good guys and giving up their program,
but the net result of that was to provide them with $150 billion of money that they
can spend on supporting terror.
We have altered our policies I think during the Obama Administration in major ways to
appease the Iranians, when strength and the possible use of force has been the key in
the past.
But it hasn't been used in this administration at all and I think that's to the detriment
of our interest.