The Cheney Speech

by John Hawkins | August 26, 2002 9:28 pm

The Cheney Speech: The latest Cheney Speech[1] wasn’t quite good enough to get immortalized in our speech section but there was a lot of good stuff in it including…

Why containment had to be replaced with preemption…

“As we face this prospect, old doctrines of security do not apply. In the days of the Cold War, we were able to manage the threat with strategies of deterrence and containment. But it’s a lot tougher to deter enemies who have no country to defend. And containment is not possible when dictators obtain weapons of mass destruction, and are prepared to share them with terrorists who intend to inflict catastrophic casualties on the United States.”

The difficulty of accessing how close Hussein is to acquiring nukes…

“Prior to the Gulf War, America’s top intelligence analysts would come to my office in the Defense Department and tell me that Saddam Hussein was at least five or perhaps even 10 years away from having a nuclear weapon. After the war we learned that he had been much closer than that, perhaps within a year of acquiring such a weapon.

On the perils of waiting until Hussein has nukes to act…

“As one of those who worked to assemble the Gulf War coalition, I can tell you that our job then would have been infinitely more difficult in the face of a nuclear-armed Saddam Hussein. And many of those who now argue that we should act only if he gets a nuclear weapon, would then turn around and say that we cannot act because he has a nuclear weapon. At bottom, that argument counsels a course of inaction that itself could have devastating consequences for many countries, including our own.

You can check out the rest by clicking here[2].

Endnotes:
  1. Cheney Speech: http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2002/08/20020826.html
  2. here: http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2002/08/20020826.html

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