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“Now with almost one 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?” Kelly said.

Cheney, who seemed taken aback, defended the Bush administration’s actions in Iraq.

“Well, I just fundamentally disagree, Reagan — uh, Megyn,” Cheney said. “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, 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.”

The Cheneys’ op-ed sparked controversy and a snippy dismissal from the current White House on Wednesday, due to Dick Cheney’s role in the Iraq war. As Kelly said in introducing him, he was the “the man who helped lead us into Iraq in the first place.”

Kelly opened her segment by pointing to a particularly harsh response to Cheney’s op-ed from The Washington Post’s Paul Waldman, who wrote there has not been a “single person” who has been “more wrong and shamelessly dishonest” on Iraq than Cheney.

“The suggestion, then, is that you caused this mess, Mr. Vice President,” Kelly said. “What say you?”

“Well, obviously I disagree,” Cheney said. “I think we went into Iraq for very good reasons.”