Cheney: ‘I was right about Iraq’

Former Vice President Dick Cheney says he was right to support the invasion of Iraq under former President George W. Bush.

“Well if people say, Dick Cheney was wrong about Iraq, why should they listen to you on Iran?” asked Juan Williams, a Fox commentator and columnist for The Hill on Fox News’s “The Five” on Wednesday.

“Because I was right about Iraq,” Cheney responded.

“Our objective was to take down Saddam Hussein. We did it. The world’s a much better place without him,” he added.

{mosads}Cheney also noted former Libyan leader Muammar Gadhafi eliminated his weapons program, surrendering his centrifuges, uranium feedstock and weapons design in 2003. And he noted the U.S. went after Abdul Qadeer Khan, a key figure in the Pakistani nuclear program.

“So we achieved a lot when we went into Iraq. A lot of people don’t like to talk about the rest of it. But we did the right thing then, and I’m convinced now that it was absolutely the right thing,” Cheney said.

Cheney and his daughter Liz Cheney have been promoting their new book, focusing on national security and pushing back on President Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran.

Meanwhile, the Iraq War has flared up as an issue in the 2016 presidential race for former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush.

The GOP presidential candidate initially stumbled as he tried to both offer support for his brother, former President George W. Bush, while also insisting he would be his own man on foreign policy.

“Knowing what we know now … I would have not engaged, I would not have gone into Iraq,” Bush said in May, while maintaining that the world is safer with the removal of Hussain.

Cheney, who earlier this week said he had “no apologies” going into Iraq, reiterated Wednesday evening that the invasion was the right decision, even in retrospect.