This Sunday will mark the fifth anniversary of Vice President Dick Cheney’s disastrous and uninformed prediction that U.S. troops would be greeted as liberators in Iraq:
CHENEY: Now, I think things have gotten so bad inside Iraq, from the standpoint of the Iraqi people, my belief is we will, in fact, be greeted as liberators. [3/16/03]
That same month — in March 2003 — McCain was parroting the Bush administration’s rosy talk, repeating on many occasions that “we will be greeted as liberators.” Cheney and the administration ignored numerous pre-war intelligence analyses which warned “that the U.S. would face armed resistance from Iraqis following the fall of Saddam Hussein’s regime.”
After the war began and an insurgency took hold in Iraq, the two cheerleaders of the Iraq invasion attempted to argue that they had been proven right — that the U.S. was greeted as liberators in Iraq. In Sept. 2003, Cheney told Tim Russert that “we have” been welcomed by “most Iraqis.” And following Cheney’s lead once again, McCain said in Jan. 2007, “We were greeted as liberators,” adding that the Iraq war was “easy.”
Watch a compilation of McCain and Cheney’s remarks: