Seriously, he must be high to think yesterday’s weapons inspection report backed him up :

Vice President Dick Cheney asserted on Thursday that a report by the chief U.S. weapons inspector in Iraq, who found no evidence that Iraq produced weapons of mass destruction after 1991, justifies rather than undermines President Bush’s decision to go to war.
. . .
While Democrats seized on the new report by Charles Duelfer to bolster their case that invading Iraq was a mistake, Cheney focused on portions of the report that were more favorable to the administration’s case.

Although it says Saddam’s weapons program had deteriorated since the 1991 Gulf War and did not pose a threat to the world in 2003, the report also says that Saddam’s main goal was to get international sanctions lifted.

“As soon as the sanctions were lifted he had every intention of going back” to his weapons program, Cheney said.

Whew! That was a close call. It’s a good thing we’ve got such strong willed leaders who realize the effectiveness of Iraqi sanctions, right?? Well, here’s Cheney’s position from 2001 :

An influential energy task force headed by Vice President Cheney has broached the possibility of lifting some economic sanctions against Iran, Libya and Iraq as part of a plan to increase America’s oil supply. According to a draft of the task force report, the United States should review the sanctions against the three countries because of the importance of their oil production to meeting domestic and global energy needs.

The April 10 draft acknowledges that sanctions can “advance” important national security and diplomatic goals. But it adds that United Nations sanctions on Iraq and U.S. restrictions on energy investments in Libya and Iran “affect some of the most important existing and prospective petroleum producing countries in the world.” “The administration will initiate a comprehensive sanctions review and seek to engage the Congress in a partnership for sanctions reform,” the draft said. The nation’s energy security should be one of the priorities of U.S. domestic and foreign policy, according to a portion of the draft read to The Washington Post and confirmed by the White House.
. . .
A cross-section of the energy industry, including oil companies such as Exxon Mobil Corp. and production services companies such as Halliburton, have been pressing Congress and administration policy-makers under Bush and former president Bill Clinton to give them access to Libya, Iran and Iraq. Cheney was chief executive of Halliburton before Bush tapped him to be his running mate last year.

And if you think that’s just because he was motivated by cash, here’s an article from the run-up to the last Iraq war that shows that Cheney was never a big fan of sanctions against Iraq.

CHENEY: SANCTIONS AGAINST IRAQ MAY FAIL IN LONG TERM
December 14, 1990

Washington — Defense Secretary Cheney says there is no evidence that economic sanctions — even after they have been in effect for two years — will force Iraqi President Saddam Hussein to leave Kuwait. And he suggests that preparing for an offensive military option may be the best way to persuade the Iraqi leader to relinquish Kuwait.

The United States already has worked to resolve the Persian Gulf crisis on diplomatic, economic, and military fronts, and has not seen any evidence that Iraq is prepared to withdraw, Cheney said December 14. While sanctions might work in the long term, he said, “nobody can persuade me…that there is a high probability” that they will.

But here we are fourteen years later, with a Vice President who was against sanctions before he was for them. Lemme point out another quote from today’s article that shows you the full extent of Cheney’s swing :

“As soon as the sanctions were lifted he had every intention of going back” to his weapons program, Cheney said.

Cheney said the report also concluded that the United Nations’ “Fuel for Food” program “was totally corrupted by Saddam Hussein. There were suggestions employees of the United Nations were part of the scheme as well.”

“The suggestion is clearly there by Mr. Duelfer that Saddam had used the program in such a way that he had bought off foreign governments and was building support among them to take the sanctions down,” Cheney said.

That being the case, there was no reason to wait to invade Iraq to give inspectors more time to do their work, Cheney said.

So Cheney’s point seems to be that the international community’s efforts to ease sanctions were playing into Saddam’s plans and that’s the reason we needed to flip off the world and start blowing shit up. But Mr. Vice President, you might ask, then why were you so intent on helping Saddam in 1990 and 2001?

In one corner we’ve got the Dick Cheney who was against imposing sanctions at the outset and then tried to ease them when he came back into public life. In the other corner we’ve got the Dick Cheney of today who’s such an ardent supporter of sanctions that he’d use their undermining as an excuse to go to war. Can we really trust a leader who will change his position on something this important for political expediency? Isn’t there a term for that??

Update : Digby has more on this.