"capacity for violence" and double talk

September 10, 2006

Interview of the Vice President by Tim Russert, NBC News, Meet the Press
NBC Studios
Washington, D.C.

....But it is absolutely the right thing to do, Tim, because if we weren't there, if Saddam Hussein were still in power, the situation would be far worse than it is today.


You'd have a man who had a demonstrated capacity for violence, who'd started two wars, who had, in fact, been involved with weapons of mass destruction, who had every intention of going back to it when the sanctions were lifted. And by this point, especially with Ahmadinejad, living next door in Iran, pursuing nuclear weapons, there is no doubt in my mind that if Saddam Hussein was still in power, he would have a very robust program underway to try to do exactly the same thing. The world is better off because Saddam Hussein is in jail instead of in power in Baghdad. It was the right thing to do, and if we had to do it over again we would do exactly the same thing.

Q Exactly the same thing?

THE VICE PRESIDENT: Yes, sir.
Source

Couple of Interesting points:

President Geroge W Bush and Vice President Cheney "demonstrated capacity for violence" by starting two wars after being in office for only 3 years. It took Saddam over 20 years to start two wars.

Furthermore, just as Saddam would hypothetically pursued a nuclear program against Iran, Bush administration have repeatedly threaten Iran with nuclear weapons, even though, there is no evidence that Iran is working on nuclear weapons.

It is interesting that Vice President is candid in that he says they would do exactly the same thing essentially with or without WMD. We know that Bush administration didn't have any evidence of Iraq WMD programs and fabricated the WMD stories. In a sense, Bush administration would have done exactly the same thing, as it did, since at the time it knew there were no WMD in Iraq.

So the real question is would he fabricate the WMD story again or would he use a different excuse.