Joan Didion on Dick Cheney.
In 1991, explaining why he agreed with George H.W. Bush's decision not to take the Gulf War to Baghdad, Cheney had acknowledged the probability that any such invasion would be followed by civil war in Iraq:
Once you've got Baghdad, it's not clear what you do with it. It's not clear what kind of government you would put in.... Is it going to be a Shia regime, a Sunni regime or a Kurdish regime? Or one that tilts toward the Baathists, or one that tilts toward the Islamic fundamentalists?... How long does the United States military have to stay to protect the people that sign on for that government, and what happens to it once we leave?
By January 2006, when the prescience of these questions was evident and polling showed that 47 percent of Iraqis approved of "attacks on US-led forces," and the administration was still calculating that it could silence domestic doubt by accusing the doubter of wanting to "cut and run," the Vice President assured Fox News that the course had been true. "When we look back on this ten years hence," he said, a time frame suggesting that he was once again leaving the cleanup to someone else, "we will have fundamentally changed the course of history in that part of the world, and that will be an enormous advantage for the United States and for all of those countries that live in the region."
