This doesn't make anything better

Jonathan Schwarz drudges up a YouTube video of Dick Cheney from April '94, explaining why deposing Saddam Hussein would have been such a very bad idea in the first Gulf War. Here's part of it:

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?

You know, I used to just assume that the Bush administration didn't even bother thinking about these sorts of things before charging gung-ho to topple a country. If they were incompetent lackwits without an ounce of foresight, that was bad enough. But if they actually had thought of these objections, and still didn't do any post-war planning, and went and conquered Baghdad anyways... that's just fucking sadistic.

There's also this ironic quip from Cheney:

[T]he question for the president, in terms of whether or not we went on to Baghdad, took additional casualties in an effort to get Saddam Hussein, was how many additional dead Americans is Saddam worth? Our judgement [sic] was, not very many, and I think we got it right.

So, 146+ dead Americans was too steep a price to pay for the removal of Saddam Hussein back in 1994. But in 2007, 3500+ dead Americans is well worth deposing that same man, after he got rid of anything that made him a possible danger.

Inflation's a bitch.