Transcript: Cheney Defends Hard Line Tactics
In Exclusive Interview With ABC News, Vice President Dick Cheney Opens Up About His Hard Line Tactics
We clearly are involved now in a recession. We see that around us every day but I think part of that is the fallout from the financial crisis we had earlier this year and it's a global problem. It's not just the United States that's affected here. This is really both, whether we're talking about the recession or we talk about financial problems, these are global issues that are going to effect everybody worldwide and it seems to me you cannot treat this just as an isolated problem inside the United State as has often been the case in the past with our recession. This is one that's going to occur on a global basis.
KARL: You've been called the most powerful vice president in history. Help me understand how a guy who didn't even seek this job out managed to do that.
CHENEY: Well, whatever I've been able to do as vice president, it's been because that's what the president wanted me to do. And I have enjoyed very much my time as vice president, it's been a tremendous experience. It's not anything I sought as you mentioned. The president asked me to take it on and I agreed to do it and I think it was exactly the right decision from my standpoint. In terms of how I'm viewed as a powerful vice president or influential vice president, I think that's something that we'll have to leave to the historians. There are a lot of people out there with opinions and I'll let somebody else sort them out.
KARL: What do you say to those who say you've changed? I mean, you've seen friends go across, say, I don't know Dick Cheney any more. They've really known you just about as long as anybody in this town. What do you say to that?
CHENEY: Well, I – the way I think of it is in terms of whether or not I changed, I think a prime motivation for me and much of what I've done was 9/11. And being here on 9/11, going through that experience. And reaching the conclusion that somebody said the other day that I said at that point, that's not going to happen again on my watch. And we've done everything we could, the president has, I have, a lot of the people that we work with, to make certain that didn't happen.
And we've succeeded. But when you contemplate the 9/11 with terrorists instead of being armed with box cutters and airline tickets, equipped with a nuclear weapon or a biological agent of some kind in the middle of one of our cities and think about the consequences of that and then I think we're justified in taking bold action. I think it's incumbent upon us to take bold action to make certain that never happens.
And it does say we've been successful for seven and a half years now and have I changed? Well, not in the sense that I've gone through some fundamental psychological transition here but I have been since that day focused very much on what we needed to do to defend the nation and I think the policies we've recommended, the programs that we've undertaken have been good program. I think those have been sound decisions and if that's what they mean by saying I've changed, I'm guilty.
KARL: What did you think when you saw that shoe flying at the president?
CHENEY: Well, I thought the president handled it rather well. He had some good moves the way he ducked and avoided the shoe and then what was his response? That it was a size 10 and he could see that as it went by. No, I think it's an incident where an Iraqi reporter threw shoes at the president. I don't attribute any special significance to it.
KARL: But when you were told during another interview that the American public is overwhelmingly against the war, you said, "So?" Do you regret saying that? Would you take that back.
CHENEY: No. In effect what I did was, the person who made the statement they didn't ask a question. And after they made a statement, I said, "So?" expecting a question and I didn't get a question. And I took "So" to mean that I didn't have any concern for public opinion. I do. But I don't think and the point I made then is that we could not have done what we'd done if we'd been reading the polls.
If we had responded to the polls I think the world would look very different today than it does. I think Saddam Hussein would still be in power. I think the progress that we've made in liberating 50 million people in Iraq and Afghanistan might well have not happened.
You can't base public policy or tough decisions in a presidency simply on what's happening in the polls. They change from week to week. You can take two polls on exactly the same day and get totally different results. It's just a bad way to make policy. And we didn't do that. What we did was what we thought was right for the country. We stood once for reelection and were reelected and we've continued to pursue those policies throughout our time in office.
Our objective has not been to see how high we could get our poll numbers by the time we left office. Our objective has been to do other things such as defend the nation, pursue a successful counterinsurgency program to prevail in Iraq and Afghanistan, reform the education system, add prescription drug benefits to Medicare, cut taxes. Those are all things that I think we've succeeded on. They were not all popular, especially what we did in the national security area I think has been controversial but it was the right thing to do and the president and I were elected to make decisions and not to read polls.
KARL: Now, President Bush recently said that his greatest regret was that the intelligence was wrong on weapons of mass destruction. Is that your biggest regret?
CHENEY: No, I wouldn't – I understand why he says that. I certainly share the frustration that the intelligence report on Iraq WMD generated but in terms of the intelligence itself, I tend to look at the entire community and what they've done over the course of the last several years. Intelligence – it's not a science, it's an art form in many respects and you don't always get it right.
I think while I would mention that as a major failure of the intelligence community, it clearly was. On the other hand, we've had other successes and failures. I think the run-up to 9/11 where we missed that attack was a failure. On the other hand we've had great success since 9/11 in terms of what the intelligence community has contributed overall to the defense of the nation, to defeating al Qaeda, to making it possible for us to do very serious damage to our enemies.
KARL: You probably saw Karl Rove last week said that if the intelligence had been correct we probably would not have gone to war.
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