Megyn Kelly Rips Dick Cheney On Iraq Piece

Fox News’ Megyn Kelly sat down with former Vice President Dick Cheney, and the anchor took Cheney to task in an uncharacteristically hardball segment on his recent statements about President Barack Obama and Iraq.

In case you missed it, Megyn Kelly was referring to a recent op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, one that stunned many Americans with Dick Cheney’s brazen, revisionist opener:

“Rarely has a U.S. president been so wrong about so much at the expense of so many.”

Cheney was, in the writing, referring not to his own administration, but the current one — despite now-widespread popular opinion that the post-9/11 invasion of Iraq was a poor decision.

Kelly bluntly quoted Cheney to the former Vice President and daughter Liz, adding:

“But time and time again, history has proven that you got it wrong as well, sir.”

After that statement, she continued, listing off Cheney’s own missteps on the matter of Iraq:

“You said there were no doubts that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. You said we would be greeted as liberators. You said the Iraq insurgency was in its last throes back in 2005. And you said after our intervention, extremists would have to ‘rethink their strategy of jihad.’ Now with almost a trillion dollars spent there with 4,500 American lives lost there, what do you say to those who say you were so wrong about so much at the expense of so many?”

Cheney replied, defending the decision to invade Iraq and explaining:

“I fundamentally disagree, Megyn. You’ve got to go back and look at the track record. We inherited a situation where there was no doubt in anybody’s mind about the extent of Saddam’s involvement in weapons of mass destruction. We had a situation where if we — after 9/11, we were concerned about a follow-up attack, it would involve not just airline tickets and box cutters as the weapons, but rather something far deadlier, perhaps even a nuclear weapon.”

However, when it comes to “inheriting” bad lots, Cheney feels that the defense holds for his administration — and not the current one. Liz Cheney told Kelly “that there are a lot of people now that want to blame the Bush/Cheney administration for what happened, that’s a pretty routine thing we hear from this administration.”

Briefly, White House Press Correspondent Jay Carney addressed Cheney’s remarks, saying the former Vice President is “entitled to his opinion.”

In addition to grilling Dick Cheney on Iraq, Megyn Kelly also quoted a widely circulated Washington Post op-ed in which Paul Waldman opines that there is no one “who has been more wrong and more shamelessly dishonest on the topic of Iraq than Dick Cheney.”