Former President Bill Clinton hit back against Dick Cheney after the former vice president attacked the Obama administration for creating the crisis in Iraq.
“You know, if they hadn’t gone to war in Iraq, none of this would be happening,” Clinton said in an interview to be broadcast Sunday on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” referring to Cheney and former President George W. Bush’s administration, according to USA Today.
Cheney, as vice president, was a proponent of the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq, saying the country had developed weapons of mass destruction. The United States invaded Iraq and removed dictator Saddam Hussein, but the alleged weapons were never found.
During the NBC interview with David Gregory, Clinton was asked about the situation in parts of Syria which have been overrun by the terror forces of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS).
“Well, it might be happening in Syria, but what happened in Syria wouldn’t have happened in Iraq,” Clinton replied. “Iraq would not have been, in effect, drastically altered, as it has been.”
“Cheney has been incredibly adroit for the last six years or so attacking the administration for not doing an adequate job of cleaning up the mess that he made. And I think it’s unseemly.”
Earlier this month, Cheney wrote in a commentary for The Wall Street Journal that America’s enemies have been “emboldened” by Obama’s decision to pull out of Iraq and Afghanistan, and they are now a major threat to the United States.
“Rarely has a U.S. president been so wrong about so much at the expense of so many,” Cheney, along with his attorney daughter Liz Cheney, wrote in the opinion piece.
Clinton’s wife Hillary, a potential Democratic presidential candidate in 2016, was the first secretary of state under the Obama administration and helped to create the current foreign policy in the Middle East.
In the NBC interview, Bill Clinton praised George W. Bush for not getting involved in the blame game, unlike Cheney, over the current Iraqi insurgency by ISIS fighters.
“I give President Bush, by the way, a lot of credit for trying to stay out of this debate and letting other people work through it,” Clinton said.