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The Kentucky senator twice suggested that Halliburton's relationship with Dick Cheney influenced Iraq policy. Is that so crazy?

Reuters

Every American sees that leaders in foreign countries sometimes behave immorally. Yet we often seem averse to believing that our own leaders can be just as malign. That's certainly my bias: Judging the character of U.S. officials, my gut impulse is to give them the benefit of the doubt. But I know that my gut is sometimes wrong, that our institutions rather than anything intrinsic to our compatriots explains the comparative lack of corruption and tyranny in the United States, and that it's important to stay open to the possibility of malign or corrupt leadersbecause otherwise, it's impossible to adequately guard against them. The Founders understood this. So did generations of traditional conservatives. Have today's Americans forgotten?

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An old clip of Senator Rand Paul is in the news.

In 2009, he warned college Republicans at Western Kentucky University to "be fearful of companies that get so big that they can actually be directing policy."The example he used to illustrate the point: Dick Cheney's relationship with Halliburton, a defense contractor that benefited from the Iraq War. After serving as George H.W. Bush's secretary of defense from 1989 to 1993, Cheney was chairman and CEO of Halliburton from 1995 to 2000. In the 2009 clip, Paul said that in 1995, Cheney had argued on video that the Bush Administration was right to avoid invading and occupying Iraq.

The clip he cited is actually from 1994. Here it is with a transcript:

If we'd gone to Baghdad we would have been all alone. There wouldn't have been anyone else with us. It would have been a U.S. occupation of Iraq; none of the Arab forces that were willing to fight with us in Kuwait were willing to invade Iraq. Once you got to Iraq and took it over, and took down Saddam Hussein's government, then what are you going to put in its place? That's a very volatile part of the world, and if you take down the central government in Iraq, you can easily end up seeing pieces of Iraq fly off. Part of it the Syrians would like to have to the west. Part of eastern Iraq, the Iranians would like to claim, fought over for eight years. In the north you've got the Kurds; if the Kurds spin loose and join with the Kurds in Turkey, then you've threatened the territorial integrity of Turkey. It's a quagmire if you go that far and try to take over Iraq.

The other thing was casualties. Everyone was impressed with the fact that we were able to do our job with as few casualties as we had. But for the 146 Americans killed in action and for their families it wasn't a cheap war. And the question for the president, in terms of whether or not we went on to Baghdad, and took additional casualties in an effort to get Saddam Hussein, was how many additional dead Americans is Saddam worth?

And our judgment was not very many, and I think we got it right.

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Dick Cheney, Rand Paul, and the Possibility of Malign Leaders