Remember Dick Cheney lauding as a paragon of democracy the Guatemalan elections of 1984?

This morning the VP was a guest on Don Imus's radio show where he said the following regarding why Iraq has been harder to control than he originally expected:

R. CHENEY: No, if I were to think back on things that turned out differently than I would have expected, when you talk about Iraq, one of the things I’m still struck by is the devastation, the lasting consequences, if you will, of what happened in ‘91 with respect to the Iraqi population that we found once we toppled Saddam Hussein’s regime and got into Iraq.

R. CHENEY: The brutality that he used in 1991 to put down the revolt at the time I think just had devastating consequences in terms of the ability of the Iraqi people to recover from his rule. It’s taken a very long time for them to come back, to take control of their own affairs.

I think the hundreds of thousands of people, literally, that were slaughtered during that period of time, including anybody who had the gumption to stand up and challenge him, made the situation tougher than I would have thought.

I would chalk that up as a miscalculation, where I thought things would have recovered more quickly.

Iraq - revolt - 1991. Hmmm...could the Vice President be talking about the popular revolt against Saddam Hussein that rose up after President George H.W. Bush called on the people of Iraq to rise up and liberate themselves? The revolt the U.S. aided Saddam Hussein in violently suppressing? Is that the "brutality" and "devastation" that Cheney didn't understand? The violent suppression that the U.S. helped with because, in the words of former State Department official Richard Haas, "What we want is Saddam's regime without Saddam"? That one?

Poor Dick Cheney. How could he have known? He was only Secretary of Defense at the time.

Dick Cheney - the man, the Vice President, the bald-faced liar.