Cheney: Retreat would let terrorists run Iraq

WASHINGTON - Vice President Cheney on Monday said he strongly disagrees with a battle-tested congressman who advocates quickly pulling all U.S. troops from Iraq, calling such a proposal “a dangerous illusion.”

But Cheney stopped short of joining those Republicans who have questioned the patriotism and courage of Rep. John Murtha, D-Pa., calling him “a good man, a Marine, a patriot.” Cheney’s subdued comments about Murtha followed those of President Bush and Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld.

At the same time, Cheney pressed the administration’s high-voltage attack on war critics, particularly Senate Democrats who voted in October 2002 to give Bush authority to go to war in Iraq and who now oppose his policy, calling them “dishonest and reprehensible.”

“The flaws in the intelligence are plain enough in hindsight. But any suggestion that prewar information was distorted, hyped or fabricated by the leader of the nation is utterly false,” Cheney said in a speech to the American Enterprise Institute.

In a written statement obtained by NBC News, Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass., raised the possibility that Cheney “or someone else distorted, hyped or fabricated that information and fed it to the president.”

“It defies belief that the vice president can continue to say with a straight face that Congress had the same intelligence as the president and vice president had as we went to war,” Kennedy wrote. “Congress did not have access to the presidential daily briefs that President Bush received on intelligence since the beginning of his administration.”  

In his letter, Kennedy said he plans to offer an amendment that would force the administration to turn over relevant presidential daily briefs.

160,000 troops still in Iraq
As to proposals for a rapid pullout of U.S. troops, Cheney said, “It is a dangerous illusion to suppose that another retreat by the civilized world would satisfy the appetite of the terrorists and get them to leave us alone.” Nearly 160,000 U.S. troops remain in Iraq.

Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton said Monday that an immediate U.S. withdrawal from Iraq would be “a big mistake.”

The New York Democrat said she respects Murtha’s call for a pullout, but she added: “I think that would cause more problems for us in America.”

“It will matter to us if Iraq totally collapses into civil war, if it becomes a failed state the way Afghanistan was, where terrorists are free to basically set up camp and launch attacks against us,” she said.

At the same time, Clinton said the Bush administration’s pledge to stay in Iraq “until the job is done” amounts to giving the Iraqis “an open-ended invitation not to take care of themselves.”

Terrorists are ‘testing our resolve’
Cheney ticked off a long list of terrorist attacks on American interests going back more than the two decades that preceded the 2003 U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, including the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and earlier ones in Beirut, Saudi Arabia and Africa.

“Now they’re making a stand in Iraq, testing our resolve, trying to intimidate the United States into abandoning our friends and permitting the overthrow of this new Middle Eastern democracy,” Cheney said.

He said he respected the right of Murtha to form his own opinion. Murtha has served in Congress for three decades, is a decorated Marine combat veteran from Vietnam, the top Democrat on the House Appropriations defense subcommittee and has long been an ardent defender of the armed forces.

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