Don Imus interviewing Dick Cheney on inauguration day:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6847999/Upon being asked about Seymour Hersh's assertions and what the intentions of the government are, Cheney replied:
"Well, we are, I’d say, very concerned about Iran, because for two reasons, again, one, they do have a program. We believe they have a fairly robust new nuclear program. That’s been developed by, or being pursued I guess would be the best way to put it, by members of the E.U.—the Brits, the Germans and the French—have been negotiating with the Iranians to get them to allow greater transparency in their program so the outside world can be confident they’re not building weapons, that it’s for peaceful purposes.
The other problem we have, of course, is that Iran is a noted sponsor of terror. They’ve been the prime backers of the Hezbollah over the years, and they have, in fact, been—used terror in various incendiary ways to kill Americans and a lot of other folks around the globe, too, and that combination is of great concern.
We’ll continue to try to address those issues diplomatically, continue to work with the Europeans. At some point, if the Iranians don’t live up to their commitments, the next step will be to take it to the U.N. Security Council, and seek the imposition of international sanctions to force them to live up to the commitments and obligations they’ve signed up to under the non-proliferation treaty, and it’s—but it is a—you know, you look around the world at potential trouble spots, Iran is right at the top of the list."
<snip>
"Well, one of the concerns people have is that Israel might do it without being asked, that if, in fact, the Israelis became convinced the Iranians had significant nuclear capability, given the fact that Iran has a stated policy that their objective is the destruction of Israel, the Israelis might well decide to act first, and let the rest of the world worry about cleaning up the diplomatic mess afterwards."
This was only a few minutes after he'd weasled his way out of an explanation of the reasons given for going to war in Iraq, and how it was bad intelligence that led them to believe Saddam had WMDs, etc. He said it was part of the case because of Saddam's track record, but that he could "understand why some people have the view that it was all about WMD." (More reasons for having that view:
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=104&topic_id=2946703) And he said that the second reason for going to war was Saddam's "association with terror."
The point of this rambling post is that this interview was given on the day of the inaugural speech, which got all the media attention. But the things said in the interview show clearly that we're going down exactly the same road with Iran that we did with Iraq, almost to the extent of some of the phrasing of the buildup case being very similar - ("We believe they have a fairly robust new program"; "sponsors of terror").(As a side note, I wonder if this was an intentional typo? I didn't listen to the show itself, so I don't know what word he actually said.):
IMUS: Mr. Vice President, several months ago, when the communists from the press asked the president at a press conference if he could think of any mistakes he’d ever made, and the president said he couldn’t, and then he recently told Barbara Walters that there were a couple things that he wished he hadn’t said.
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