Adam Schiff: “Last Sunday Vice President Cheney appeared on NBC's ``Meet the Press'' and provided a vivid example of George…”

“Last Sunday Vice President Cheney appeared on NBC's ``Meet the Press'' and provided a vivid example of George Santayana's admonition that ``those who do not learn from the past are doomed to repeat it.'' After 3\1/2\ years of bloody combat; after our Nation has lost more than 2,600 of our military's finest; after thousands more of our brave men and women have been wounded; after we have spent more than $300 billion; with no end in sight to the insurgency and Iraq plunging into civil war; and after finding no weapons of mass destruction, the very basis of that war, the Vice President told the American people that ``if we had to do it over again, we'd do exactly the same thing.'' Never mind that the next day the Washington Post published an article on the front page entitled ``Situation called Dire in West Iraq: Anbar is Lost Politically, Marine Analyst Says,'' which revealed that the Marine Corps Chief of Intelligence had recently completed a report that concluded the prospects for securing Iraq's western Anbar province are ``dim'' and that there is almost nothing the U.S. military can do to improve the political and social situation there. According to Vice President Cheney, ``if we had to do it over again, we'd do exactly the same thing.'' Never mind that our invasion of Iraq was predicated on the need to neutralize Saddam Hussein's active nuclear weapons program and destroy his stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons. But no weapons were ever found.…”