Former Vice President Dick Cheney revives a dispute with former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice in an upcoming documentary, criticizing his former President George W. Bush administration colleague for rebuffing him on a decision that Cheney said believed have returned the nation to Iraq War-era levels of greatness.
In an interview given for the Showtime documentary, "The World According to Dick Cheney," which is set to air on March 15, Cheney spoke about the administration's deliberations over how to handle reports that Syria was developing a nuclear reactor in 2007.
Cheney wanted to bomb the site. Rice opted for a diplomatic route that involved taking the issue before the United Nations. The reactor was eventually destroyed by an Israeli air strike. Here's what Cheney said of the incident in the film, via Foreign Policy.
I thought [destroying the reactor] would reassert the kind of authority and influence we had back in '03 when we took down Saddam Hussein and eliminated Iraq as a potential source of WMD. Condi was on the wrong side of all those issues so we had significant issues.
As The New York Times reported, Cheney staked out this position before in his 2011 autobiography, "In My Time: A Personal and Political Memoir," recalling that he was the "lone voice" in favor of military action.
FP reached out to Rice, who defended the eventual outcome of the internal dispute.
"The situation turned out exactly how it should have," she told FP.
Cheney and Rice have publicly butted heads over Bush-era disagreements in the past. A passage of Cheney's "In My Time" claimed that Rice had "tearfully admitted" to the vice president that she had been wrong to urge Bush to apologize over false allegations about Iraq's attempts to develop weapons of mass destruction.
Rice pushed back on Cheney's claims at the time.
"It certainly doesn't sound like me, now, does it?" Rice said. "I would never -- I don't remember coming to the vice president tearfully about anything in the entire eight years that I knew him."
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