MEGYN KELLY: In your op-ed, you write as follows: 'Rarely has a U.S. president been so wrong about so much at the expense of so many.' But time and time again, history has proven that you got it wrong as well, sir. You said there were no doubts that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. You said we would be greeted as liberators. You said the Iraq insurgency was in its last throes back in 2005. And you said after our intervention, extremists would have to "rethink their strategy of jihad." Now with almost a trillion dollars spent there with 4,500 American lives lost there, what do you say to those who say you were so wrong about so much at the expense of so many?



FORMER VICE PRESIDENT DICK CHENEY: Well, I just fundamentally disagree, Megyn. You've got to go back and look at the track record. We inherited a situation where there was no doubt in anybody's mind about the extent of Saddam's involvement in weapons of mass destruction. We had a situation where if we -- after 9/11, we were concerned about a follow-up attack, it would involve not just airline tickets and box cutters as the weapons, but rather something far deadlier, perhaps even a nuclear weapon.



Saddam Hussein had a track record that nearly everybody agreed to. We had an overwhelming vote of approval from the Congress. More votes for the action than we'd had in Desert Storm some ten years before. Bill Clinton, Nancy Pelosi, numerous others, spoke to the difficulties of the intelligence that all of us saw with respect to the threat that Saddam Hussein represented.



It would have been irresponsible for us not to act. We did do the right thing, and I think the troops performed magnificently, and now we're in a situation where what Liz and I posted in our op-ed this morning is it's not just Iraq, but it's a whole pattern of behavior over the last six years that has refused to recognize that there is a War on Terror, that we've got to move very aggressively to be able to deal with that, and this administration has repeatedly demonstrated that they don't believe it.



Barack Obama has stated repeatedly that the terrorist threat is gone, we've got bin Laden. That's clearly not the truth. And in fact, we have a situation tonight where terrorism is potentially in charge of a larger part of the Middle East than ever before in our history.