July 12, 2004: Cheney: Democrats ‘Trying to Rewrite History’ in Criticizing Use of Flawed Intelligence

As President Bush attempts to recast the Iraq invasion from being a military strike designed to eliminate the looming threat of Iraqi WMD into a larger strategy of bringing peace to the Middle East (see July 12, 2004), Vice President Dick Cheney adds a second thrust to the assertion by accusing Democrats of “trying to rewrite history for their own political purposes” when they criticize the administration for going to war based on flawed intelligence. Referring to Democratic presidential contenders Senators John Kerry (D-MA) and John Edwards (D-NC), who received some of the same intelligence reports the White House did before the war, Cheney says: “Now it seems they’ve both developed a convenient case of campaign amnesia. If the president was right—and he was—then they are simply trying to rewrite history for their own political purposes.” The Kerry campaign retorts that Bush and Cheney “are the ones with amnesia.… It’s as if they’ve forgotten that their go-it-alone foreign policy has made America bear the overwhelming share of casualties and costs in Iraq,” according to a campaign spokesman. [New York Times, 7/13/2004]