A video from 2009 that has recently been unearthed by Mother Jones shows Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) explaining in great detail how former Vice President Dick Cheney pushed an invasion of Iraq and subsequent war because it would benefit Halliburton, his former employer.
The video was shot during an appearance at Western Kentucky University.
Paul says Cheney was against an Iraq invasion during the presidency of George H.W. Bush, but changed his views after he worked for Halliburton.
He’s being interviewed (in 1995), I think, by the American Enterprise Institute, and and he says it would be a disaster, it would be vastly expensive, it would be civil war, we’d have no exit strategy. He goes on and on for five minutes — Dick Cheney saying it would be a bad idea, Paul said. And that’s why the first Bush didn’t go into Baghdad. Dick Cheney then goes to work for Halliburton. Makes hundreds of millions of dollars — their CEO. Next thing you know, he’s back in government, it’s a good idea to go into Iraq.
He also bashes Halliburton directly.
“When the Iraq war started, Halliburton got a billion-dollar no-bid contract. Some of the stuff has been so shoddy and so sloppy that our soldiers are over there dying in the shower from electrocution. I mean, it shouldn’t be sloppy work, it shouldn’t be bad procurement process. But it really shouldn’t be that these people are so powerful that they direct even policy.”
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Paul says the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks served as a convenient excuse for “a war they already wanted in Iraq.”
Such a theory concerning Cheney and Halliburton isn’t anything new, but does illustrate the deep divide within the GOP.
Just last week while speaking a a private gathering of Republican funders in Las Vegas, Cheney blasted members of the GOP, such as Paul, without calling him out by name.
“One of the things that concerns me first about the [2016] campaign, that I’m worried about,” Cheney said, “is what I sense to be an increasing strain of isolationism, if I can put it in those terms, in our own party.”
Via Mother Jones
