Gold9472
07-31-2007, 08:16 PM
Interview of the Vice President by Larry King, CNN
http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2007/07/20070731-2.html
(Gold9472: Quite literally, reading through this transcript makes me nauseas. The amount of bullshit, from both men, is beyond the pale.)
Vice President Ceremonial Office
Dwight D. Eisenhower Executive Office Building
11:14 A.M EDT
Q We're located in the Vice Presidential Ceremonial Office; it's in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, adjacent to the White House, with the Vice President of the United States, Dick Cheney. Thanks for giving us the time, Mr. Vice President.
THE VICE PRESIDENT: It's good to see you again, Larry.
Q Always good to see you.
Q: How do you deal with it when public opinion polls are stridently against the policy we have? Republican senators like Lugar and Hagel and Voinovich and Domenici questioning it -- do you ever, as an intelligent person, look in the mirror and say, maybe I'm wrong?
THE VICE PRESIDENT: Well, the way you have to operate in these jobs -- and the President, obviously, is the one who bears the greatest burden; he's the one who makes the decisions, but I clearly support him -- you have to do it on the basis of what you think is right and what's best for the country. The polls are notoriously unreliable, in the sense that they change all the time, they bounce around all over the place. That if you looked simply at public opinion, for example, a lot of the key decisions in our history would never have been pursued or followed through on. Washington never would have carried through for seven years of the Revolution. Abraham Lincoln would never have stayed with it in order to win the Civil War. We would have been two separate nations by then.
You can look at major moments in our history and be thankful that we had leaders and Presidents who made decisions, stuck with them and saw them through to the end.
Q But in all cases they did question themselves. In all cases they said, well, let's look at it this way. Don't you? I mean, the question is don't you ever say maybe I'm wrong?
THE VICE PRESIDENT: No, I think what we do is we look at it in terms of trying to decide what's the right thing to do, and weigh the evidence. And there's a lot of debate and discussion. We went through the exercise at the beginning of this year. You may remember when the President decided to put more forces into Baghdad. That's a time when we evaluated a whole range of options, when we talked to a wide number of people with a variety of viewpoints, met with the Joint Chiefs of Staff, talked to outside military experts, as well as the politicos on the ground and made a judgment, the President made a decision then. And I think it was the right decision, felt it was the one to go into Iraq.
Q In retrospect you would still go into Iraq?
THE VICE PRESIDENT: Yes, sir.
Q So those 3,000-plus lives have not died in vain?
THE VICE PRESIDENT: No, sir. Larry, you worry about every single casualty and --
Q Do you feel the burden of it?
THE VICE PRESIDENT: Absolutely, when you're in one of those positions the President obviously has the biggest burden. I shared some of that when I was Secretary of Defense, during Desert Storm. There are times when you make decisions to commit military forces, when you know that one of the results of that is going to be that there are going to be American casualties, that American soldiers are going to die. It's one of the most difficult things anybody has to do. It goes with being President of the United States, and we have to have somebody prepared to make those decisions. And I firmly believe, Larry, that the decisions we've made with respect to Iraq and Afghanistan have been absolutely the sound ones in terms of the overall strategy.
Q Although there were mistakes.
THE VICE PRESIDENT: Oh, sure. Yes, there are always things in war that happen that nobody anticipated; surprises, things that don't go exactly as planned. That's the nature of warfare. But that doesn't mean the strategy isn't the correct strategy, that the objective isn't the right objective.
Q Does it pain you when Brent Scowcroft says, "This is not the Dick Cheney I knew"?
THE VICE PRESIDENT: Well --
Q I mean, you were close friends.
THE VICE PRESIDENT: Sure, and I don't bear any grudges towards Brent. Brent doesn't walk in my shoes these days. He's not in the job I'm in. He's not responsible for making the decisions the President has had to make and those of us who support him and advise him.
Q Does it pain you?
THE VICE PRESIDENT: Not especially. It goes with the turf, Larry. If I were in business to be popular, I suppose I'd be worried about my poll ratings and so forth. I'm not. I came here to do a job. I'm not running for any office, myself. I made the decision when I signed on with the President that the only agenda I would have would be his agenda, that I was not going to be like most Vice Presidents -- and that was angling, trying to figure out how I was going to be elected President when his term was over with. When he's finished, I'm finished. We walk out of here on January 20th of '09, and I think we'll be able to hold our heads high knowing we did the best we could for the country. That's what counts more than anything else.
Q Wouldn't you like to be liked?
THE VICE PRESIDENT: Well, up to a point. But if you wanted to be liked, I should never have gotten involved in politics in the first place. Remember, success for a politician is 50 percent plus one, you don't have to have everybody on board.
Q Okay. Let's go back. On this program, May of 2005, you said the Iraq insurgency was in the last throes.
THE VICE PRESIDENT: Right.
Q Why were you wrong?
THE VICE PRESIDENT: I think my estimate at the time -- and it was wrong; it turned out to be incorrect -- was the fact that we were in the midst of holding three elections in Iraq, elected an interim government, then ratifying a constitution, then electing a permanent government; that they had had significant success, we'd rounded up Saddam Hussein. I thought there were a series of these milestones that would in fact undermine the insurgency and make it less than it was at that point. That clearly didn't happen. I think the insurgency turned out to be more robust.
And the other thing that happened, of course -- this was prior to the actions of al Qaeda in Iraq, Abu Musab al Zarqawi with his bombing of the mosque up at Samarra in early '06, that in effect helped to precipitate some of the sectarian conflict that led to a lot of the Shia on Sunni battles.
Q In that same interview you said that the Iraqis were well on their way to being able to defend themselves. Why not? Why aren't they? Why aren't we gone?
THE VICE PRESIDENT: They're not there yet because the job is not done yet, Larry. When you think about what's been accomplished -- in, what, about four years now since we originally launched in there -- they have in fact held three national elections, and written a constitution. There are a significant number of Iraqis now serving in the armed forces, serving as part of the security forces. We have made progress on that front. We've also obviously with the surge the President decided on last January I think made significant progress now into the course of the summer.
The real test is whether or not the strategy that was put in place for this year will in fact produce the desired results.
Q Will those results be in place on that day in '09 when you leave?
THE VICE PRESIDENT: I believe so. I think we're seeing already -- from others; don't take it from me, look at the piece that appeared yesterday in The New York Times -- not exactly a friendly publication -- but a piece by Mr. O'Hanlon and Mr. Pollack on the situation in Iraq. They're just back from visiting over there. They both have been strong critics of the war, both worked in the prior administration; but now saying that they think there's a possibility, indeed, that we could be successful. So we'll know a lot more in September, when General Petraeus and Ambassador Crocker come back and report to the Congress and the President on the situation in Iraq and whether or not we're making progress. Obviously we want to get it done as quickly as possible.
Q You don't know what to expect, though, do you? Or do you?
THE VICE PRESIDENT: Well, I think it's going to show that we will have made significant progress. The reports I'm hearing from people whose views I respect indicate that indeed the Petraeus plan is in fact producing results.
Now, admittedly, I've been on one side of this argument from the very beginning. I urge people to have an open mind, to listen to General Petraeus when he comes back, but also look at what others have to say.
Q Does it bother you that the Iraqi parliament is taking August off, while men are over there? And women.
THE VICE PRESIDENT: It's better than taking two months off, which was their original plan. Our Congress of course takes the month of August off to go back home, so I don't think we can say that they shouldn't go home at all. But obviously we're eager to have them complete their work. And they have, in fact, passed about 60 pieces of legislation this year. They have been fairly productive.
Now, there are major issues yet to be addressed and be resolved that they're still working on. But they did -- I made it clear, for example, when I was there in May that we didn't appreciate the notion that they were going to take a big part of the summer off and they did cut that in half.
Q Do you think, as you look at it yourself, that you -- you're a lifetime politician, right?
THE VICE PRESIDENT: That's how I spent most of my career.
Q You should have been more public on this?
THE VICE PRESIDENT: More "public"?
Q Yes, out there more.
THE VICE PRESIDENT: As a spokesman?
Q Yes.
THE VICE PRESIDENT: Well, I don't know, that's always debatable.
Q You think so?
THE VICE PRESIDENT: Yes, I do. I think I try to get out as much as I can. I try not to overdo it. There are times when I'm a good spokesman on a particular issue; other times when somebody else is. The President is out there a lot, obviously.
That's part of his job. And I think people would rather hear from the President than they would the Vice President. But I've done a lot of it and will continue to do a lot of it, as long as I'm Vice President.
Q By the way, is General Petraeus the be-all and end-all?
THE VICE PRESIDENT: General Petraeus is a very impressive officer. I know him. I've watched him over the years when he commanded the 101st, when we first launched into Iraq four years ago. And I spent some time with him out at Fort Leavenworth when he had the command out there. He is a very, very highly regarded officer, for good reason. He's a great soldier, and he's also something of a scholar -- a Ph.D. from Princeton. He's a man who's a very thoughtful advocate of counterinsurgency doctrine. He's really the author, if you will, of the current counterinsurgency doctrine in the U.S. Army, who's having a chance to put in practice what he has believed and developed over the years.
I don't want to put the whole burden on him. He's --
Q It seems to be he's mentioned everywhere.
THE VICE PRESIDENT: He's mentioned everywhere, and it's because he is, I think, very highly regarded by the troops, and he obviously has the confidence of the President and many of us in the administration.
Now, there are a lot of people working at it, too. General Ray Odierno, who is his number two, superb officer, man who's spent about 28 months in Iraq, himself, so far, whose son served and lost an arm, who's dedicated, just as dedicated as Dave Petraeus is to the success of this enterprise.
There are literally hundreds of thousands of people, especially the young men and women serving, who deserve credit for the effort that's currently underway.
Q Let's touch some other bases. To which branch of government do you belong? Are you executive or legislative, or both? We were a little confused over recent statements that you're not in either.
THE VICE PRESIDENT: An either/or -- maybe --
Q This building seems to be --
THE VICE PRESIDENT: -- say both is better. (Laughter.) This has been the office, Ceremonial Office of the Vice President, really since Richard Nixon was Vice President under the Eisenhower administration. But the fact is, for the 150 years before that, the Vice President didn't even have an office downtown. His office was only on Capitol Hill.
I have a foot in both camps, if you will, Larry. As Vice President, obviously, I'm next in line to succeed the President if something happens to him. I have an office in the West Wing of the White House. I advise the President. I'm a member of the National Security Council. Those are all executive functions, granted to me basically by the President.
At the same time, I have responsibilities under the Constitution for certain things up on Capitol Hill, in the Senate. I am the President of the Senate, the presiding officer of the Senate. I cast tie-breaking votes there. My paycheck actually comes from the Senate.
So the fact is, the Vice President is sort of a weird duck in the sense that you do have some duties that are executive and some are legislative.
Q Does that mean, therefore, there are certain areas you can claim one or the other and not be responsible for one or the other?
THE VICE PRESIDENT: Well, I suppose. I try not to do that. The Vice President doesn't really run anything, obviously. In the executive branch, you do only what the President asks you to do -- he gives you assignments -- but whatever authority you have is delegated by the President himself. The Constitution, on the other hand, provides for your role as the President of Senate.
Q We have an op-ed piece by Walter Mondale, former Vice President, held your job. And at that time -- I guess up to that time, he would be considered the most powerful Vice President. He wrote that after 9/11, "Cheney set out to create a largely independent power center in the office of the Vice President. He was an unprecedented attempt not only to shape administration policy but, alarmingly, to limit the policy options sent to the President." He also accused you of having a "near total aversion to the notion of accountability." How would you respond to this?
End Part I
http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2007/07/20070731-2.html
(Gold9472: Quite literally, reading through this transcript makes me nauseas. The amount of bullshit, from both men, is beyond the pale.)
Vice President Ceremonial Office
Dwight D. Eisenhower Executive Office Building
11:14 A.M EDT
Q We're located in the Vice Presidential Ceremonial Office; it's in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, adjacent to the White House, with the Vice President of the United States, Dick Cheney. Thanks for giving us the time, Mr. Vice President.
THE VICE PRESIDENT: It's good to see you again, Larry.
Q Always good to see you.
Q: How do you deal with it when public opinion polls are stridently against the policy we have? Republican senators like Lugar and Hagel and Voinovich and Domenici questioning it -- do you ever, as an intelligent person, look in the mirror and say, maybe I'm wrong?
THE VICE PRESIDENT: Well, the way you have to operate in these jobs -- and the President, obviously, is the one who bears the greatest burden; he's the one who makes the decisions, but I clearly support him -- you have to do it on the basis of what you think is right and what's best for the country. The polls are notoriously unreliable, in the sense that they change all the time, they bounce around all over the place. That if you looked simply at public opinion, for example, a lot of the key decisions in our history would never have been pursued or followed through on. Washington never would have carried through for seven years of the Revolution. Abraham Lincoln would never have stayed with it in order to win the Civil War. We would have been two separate nations by then.
You can look at major moments in our history and be thankful that we had leaders and Presidents who made decisions, stuck with them and saw them through to the end.
Q But in all cases they did question themselves. In all cases they said, well, let's look at it this way. Don't you? I mean, the question is don't you ever say maybe I'm wrong?
THE VICE PRESIDENT: No, I think what we do is we look at it in terms of trying to decide what's the right thing to do, and weigh the evidence. And there's a lot of debate and discussion. We went through the exercise at the beginning of this year. You may remember when the President decided to put more forces into Baghdad. That's a time when we evaluated a whole range of options, when we talked to a wide number of people with a variety of viewpoints, met with the Joint Chiefs of Staff, talked to outside military experts, as well as the politicos on the ground and made a judgment, the President made a decision then. And I think it was the right decision, felt it was the one to go into Iraq.
Q In retrospect you would still go into Iraq?
THE VICE PRESIDENT: Yes, sir.
Q So those 3,000-plus lives have not died in vain?
THE VICE PRESIDENT: No, sir. Larry, you worry about every single casualty and --
Q Do you feel the burden of it?
THE VICE PRESIDENT: Absolutely, when you're in one of those positions the President obviously has the biggest burden. I shared some of that when I was Secretary of Defense, during Desert Storm. There are times when you make decisions to commit military forces, when you know that one of the results of that is going to be that there are going to be American casualties, that American soldiers are going to die. It's one of the most difficult things anybody has to do. It goes with being President of the United States, and we have to have somebody prepared to make those decisions. And I firmly believe, Larry, that the decisions we've made with respect to Iraq and Afghanistan have been absolutely the sound ones in terms of the overall strategy.
Q Although there were mistakes.
THE VICE PRESIDENT: Oh, sure. Yes, there are always things in war that happen that nobody anticipated; surprises, things that don't go exactly as planned. That's the nature of warfare. But that doesn't mean the strategy isn't the correct strategy, that the objective isn't the right objective.
Q Does it pain you when Brent Scowcroft says, "This is not the Dick Cheney I knew"?
THE VICE PRESIDENT: Well --
Q I mean, you were close friends.
THE VICE PRESIDENT: Sure, and I don't bear any grudges towards Brent. Brent doesn't walk in my shoes these days. He's not in the job I'm in. He's not responsible for making the decisions the President has had to make and those of us who support him and advise him.
Q Does it pain you?
THE VICE PRESIDENT: Not especially. It goes with the turf, Larry. If I were in business to be popular, I suppose I'd be worried about my poll ratings and so forth. I'm not. I came here to do a job. I'm not running for any office, myself. I made the decision when I signed on with the President that the only agenda I would have would be his agenda, that I was not going to be like most Vice Presidents -- and that was angling, trying to figure out how I was going to be elected President when his term was over with. When he's finished, I'm finished. We walk out of here on January 20th of '09, and I think we'll be able to hold our heads high knowing we did the best we could for the country. That's what counts more than anything else.
Q Wouldn't you like to be liked?
THE VICE PRESIDENT: Well, up to a point. But if you wanted to be liked, I should never have gotten involved in politics in the first place. Remember, success for a politician is 50 percent plus one, you don't have to have everybody on board.
Q Okay. Let's go back. On this program, May of 2005, you said the Iraq insurgency was in the last throes.
THE VICE PRESIDENT: Right.
Q Why were you wrong?
THE VICE PRESIDENT: I think my estimate at the time -- and it was wrong; it turned out to be incorrect -- was the fact that we were in the midst of holding three elections in Iraq, elected an interim government, then ratifying a constitution, then electing a permanent government; that they had had significant success, we'd rounded up Saddam Hussein. I thought there were a series of these milestones that would in fact undermine the insurgency and make it less than it was at that point. That clearly didn't happen. I think the insurgency turned out to be more robust.
And the other thing that happened, of course -- this was prior to the actions of al Qaeda in Iraq, Abu Musab al Zarqawi with his bombing of the mosque up at Samarra in early '06, that in effect helped to precipitate some of the sectarian conflict that led to a lot of the Shia on Sunni battles.
Q In that same interview you said that the Iraqis were well on their way to being able to defend themselves. Why not? Why aren't they? Why aren't we gone?
THE VICE PRESIDENT: They're not there yet because the job is not done yet, Larry. When you think about what's been accomplished -- in, what, about four years now since we originally launched in there -- they have in fact held three national elections, and written a constitution. There are a significant number of Iraqis now serving in the armed forces, serving as part of the security forces. We have made progress on that front. We've also obviously with the surge the President decided on last January I think made significant progress now into the course of the summer.
The real test is whether or not the strategy that was put in place for this year will in fact produce the desired results.
Q Will those results be in place on that day in '09 when you leave?
THE VICE PRESIDENT: I believe so. I think we're seeing already -- from others; don't take it from me, look at the piece that appeared yesterday in The New York Times -- not exactly a friendly publication -- but a piece by Mr. O'Hanlon and Mr. Pollack on the situation in Iraq. They're just back from visiting over there. They both have been strong critics of the war, both worked in the prior administration; but now saying that they think there's a possibility, indeed, that we could be successful. So we'll know a lot more in September, when General Petraeus and Ambassador Crocker come back and report to the Congress and the President on the situation in Iraq and whether or not we're making progress. Obviously we want to get it done as quickly as possible.
Q You don't know what to expect, though, do you? Or do you?
THE VICE PRESIDENT: Well, I think it's going to show that we will have made significant progress. The reports I'm hearing from people whose views I respect indicate that indeed the Petraeus plan is in fact producing results.
Now, admittedly, I've been on one side of this argument from the very beginning. I urge people to have an open mind, to listen to General Petraeus when he comes back, but also look at what others have to say.
Q Does it bother you that the Iraqi parliament is taking August off, while men are over there? And women.
THE VICE PRESIDENT: It's better than taking two months off, which was their original plan. Our Congress of course takes the month of August off to go back home, so I don't think we can say that they shouldn't go home at all. But obviously we're eager to have them complete their work. And they have, in fact, passed about 60 pieces of legislation this year. They have been fairly productive.
Now, there are major issues yet to be addressed and be resolved that they're still working on. But they did -- I made it clear, for example, when I was there in May that we didn't appreciate the notion that they were going to take a big part of the summer off and they did cut that in half.
Q Do you think, as you look at it yourself, that you -- you're a lifetime politician, right?
THE VICE PRESIDENT: That's how I spent most of my career.
Q You should have been more public on this?
THE VICE PRESIDENT: More "public"?
Q Yes, out there more.
THE VICE PRESIDENT: As a spokesman?
Q Yes.
THE VICE PRESIDENT: Well, I don't know, that's always debatable.
Q You think so?
THE VICE PRESIDENT: Yes, I do. I think I try to get out as much as I can. I try not to overdo it. There are times when I'm a good spokesman on a particular issue; other times when somebody else is. The President is out there a lot, obviously.
That's part of his job. And I think people would rather hear from the President than they would the Vice President. But I've done a lot of it and will continue to do a lot of it, as long as I'm Vice President.
Q By the way, is General Petraeus the be-all and end-all?
THE VICE PRESIDENT: General Petraeus is a very impressive officer. I know him. I've watched him over the years when he commanded the 101st, when we first launched into Iraq four years ago. And I spent some time with him out at Fort Leavenworth when he had the command out there. He is a very, very highly regarded officer, for good reason. He's a great soldier, and he's also something of a scholar -- a Ph.D. from Princeton. He's a man who's a very thoughtful advocate of counterinsurgency doctrine. He's really the author, if you will, of the current counterinsurgency doctrine in the U.S. Army, who's having a chance to put in practice what he has believed and developed over the years.
I don't want to put the whole burden on him. He's --
Q It seems to be he's mentioned everywhere.
THE VICE PRESIDENT: He's mentioned everywhere, and it's because he is, I think, very highly regarded by the troops, and he obviously has the confidence of the President and many of us in the administration.
Now, there are a lot of people working at it, too. General Ray Odierno, who is his number two, superb officer, man who's spent about 28 months in Iraq, himself, so far, whose son served and lost an arm, who's dedicated, just as dedicated as Dave Petraeus is to the success of this enterprise.
There are literally hundreds of thousands of people, especially the young men and women serving, who deserve credit for the effort that's currently underway.
Q Let's touch some other bases. To which branch of government do you belong? Are you executive or legislative, or both? We were a little confused over recent statements that you're not in either.
THE VICE PRESIDENT: An either/or -- maybe --
Q This building seems to be --
THE VICE PRESIDENT: -- say both is better. (Laughter.) This has been the office, Ceremonial Office of the Vice President, really since Richard Nixon was Vice President under the Eisenhower administration. But the fact is, for the 150 years before that, the Vice President didn't even have an office downtown. His office was only on Capitol Hill.
I have a foot in both camps, if you will, Larry. As Vice President, obviously, I'm next in line to succeed the President if something happens to him. I have an office in the West Wing of the White House. I advise the President. I'm a member of the National Security Council. Those are all executive functions, granted to me basically by the President.
At the same time, I have responsibilities under the Constitution for certain things up on Capitol Hill, in the Senate. I am the President of the Senate, the presiding officer of the Senate. I cast tie-breaking votes there. My paycheck actually comes from the Senate.
So the fact is, the Vice President is sort of a weird duck in the sense that you do have some duties that are executive and some are legislative.
Q Does that mean, therefore, there are certain areas you can claim one or the other and not be responsible for one or the other?
THE VICE PRESIDENT: Well, I suppose. I try not to do that. The Vice President doesn't really run anything, obviously. In the executive branch, you do only what the President asks you to do -- he gives you assignments -- but whatever authority you have is delegated by the President himself. The Constitution, on the other hand, provides for your role as the President of Senate.
Q We have an op-ed piece by Walter Mondale, former Vice President, held your job. And at that time -- I guess up to that time, he would be considered the most powerful Vice President. He wrote that after 9/11, "Cheney set out to create a largely independent power center in the office of the Vice President. He was an unprecedented attempt not only to shape administration policy but, alarmingly, to limit the policy options sent to the President." He also accused you of having a "near total aversion to the notion of accountability." How would you respond to this?
End Part I