Evading Reality - 5

Back in 1994, Dick Cheney explained why invading Iraq and deposing Saddam Hussein would be a bad idea to do.
This dkos diary even links to the video of that interview.

Once you got to Iraq and took it over, took down Saddam Hussein's government, then what are you going to put in its place?

That's a very volatile part of the world, and if you take down the central government of Iraq, you could very easily end up seeing pieces of Iraq fly off -- part of it the Syrians would like to have to the west, part of it eastern Iraq the Iranian would like to claim, fought over it for eight years.

In the north you've got the Kurds, and if the Kurds spin loose and join with the Kurds in Turkey, then you threaten the territorial integrity of Turkey. It's a quagmire if you go that far and try to take over Iraq.

Since nothing really had changed between 1994 and 2001, one can conclude that Vice President Cheney's advocacy of the invasion of Iraq was an evasion of reality. Exactly what he foretold in 1994 has come to pass.