NYT:Cheney Returns to a 9/11 Forum for Latest Iraq Defense

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Vice President Dick Cheney on Sunday backed away from his insistence last year that the insurgency in Iraq was in its “last throes,’’ but in a contentious television interview he said that even if he had known in 2003 that his claims that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction were mistaken, “we’d do exactly the same thing.’’

(snip)
Mr. Cheney, who is rarely challenged in public, was returning to a forum he used just after the terrorist attacks and just before the Iraq war.

He sounded uncharacteristically defensive at moments, particularly as he tried to explain statements he had made over the past five years about Saddam Hussein’s weapons capabilities and ties to Al Qaeda.


(snip)
Mr. Cheney also struggled to explain his statements, three days before the war began in 2003, that American forces “will, in fact, be greeted as liberators’’ and that the war was unlikely to become long or costly.

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/11/washington/11cheney.html?ex=1158638400&en=308022db57a81f64&ei=5040&partner=MOREOVERNEWS