"I don't think anybody anticipated the level of violence that we've encountered," Cheney said. He said much of the continuing violence has its roots in "the devastation" that 30 years of Saddam Hussein's iron- fisted rule "had wrought on the psychology of the Iraqi people."Is he kidding?
Before the war started, a lot of people both in the administration, including Secretary of State Colin Powell and General Eric Shinseki, and outside, including a number of conservatives and former members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said that the invasion of Iraq would be a long and bloody struggle and that it would ignite an insurgency that wanted no part of any American "liberation." What happened to General Shinseki? Canned. What happened to Secretary Powell, who famously warned the president that we would "own" Iraq? Canned. What happened to the experts? Ignored.
It should be noted that after the Gulf War and the liberation of Kuwait in 1991 one of the reasons the first President Bush didn't order the army to march in to Baghdad was because the generals and the Joint Chiefs of Staff said that we would be getting into a long and bloody struggle if we overthrew Saddam Hussein; civil war would break out and we would be occupying the country for years. And guess who was the Secretary of Defense in the first Bush Administration?
So it's a little lame for the Vice President to claim that nobody anticipated the level of violence. A lot of people did. He just didn't listen to them.
