Cheney on Iraq: all Saddam's fault... and Clinton's...

LEHRER: The President has also said that mistakes -- he made some mistakes in the last eight years. Did you make any?

THE VICE PRESIDENT: Well, make mistakes -- I can think of places where I underestimated things. For example, when you talk about Iraq, the extent of which the Iraqi population had been beaten down by Saddam Hussein was greater than I anticipated. That is, we thought that the Iraqis would be able to bounce back fairly quickly, once Saddam was gone and their new government established, and step up to take major responsibilities for governing Iraq, building a military and so forth. And that took longer than I expected. (Riiight... it couldn't have been your infantile assumption that destroying a country and removing a government in a country with centuries-long animosities is a good way to start a country on the path to democracy... Oh yeah, "bounce back" -- like in the cartoons where Wile E. Coyote blows up and then wiggles his head a few times and his face regenerates itself? Well reality ain't Road Runner, @ss#hole...Ed.).

Q When you look back on that, why? How did that miscalculation come about?

THE VICE PRESIDENT: Well, we didn't have that good of intelligence (bad brainzzz... Ed.) I don't think, with respect to sort of a state of affairs inside Iraq. A lot of that had been wiped out over the years. Saddam Hussein was so brutal, killed so many people, slaughtered so many innocents, that it had a lasting effect on Iraqi society that was greater than I expected. . .

Q But Mr. Vice President, getting from there to here, 4,500 Americans have died, at least 100,000 Iraqis have died. Has it been worth that?

THE VICE PRESIDENT: I think so.

Q Why?

THE VICE PRESIDENT: Because I'm a soulless, blood sucking, creature of the night. Well what he actually said is here.

Still, there has to be a way to pin all this on Slick Willie...

THE VICE PRESIDENT: No. I think the argument that this is a failed presidency is just dead wrong. I think we'll hear that from some of our critics, but when I look back at what we've been able to do, we dealt with big issues, we didn't deal with school uniforms. We dealt with the fact that we brought down two of the worst regimes in the 20th century, the Taliban in Afghanistan and Saddam Hussein in Iraq.

We were forced -- when we arrived, shortly after we arrived -- to have to deal with the global war on terror, which had not been managed properly before that. We ended up inheriting this situation, which has been very challenging, but we've been very successful at it. And when you look at what we've been able to do, both in terms of our activities overseas, as well as our operations that allowed us to block any further attack against the United States here at home, I think those are great successes. And I think there aren't very many administrations that can point to successes on that scale.