Pat Dollard | Young Americans

WASHINGTON - Vice President Dick Cheney, warning against impulsive U.S. action in Iraq, says that whether the struggling nation backslides into a cycle of violence partly depends on how President-elect Barack Obama decides to pull out American forces.

“An irresponsible withdrawal now is exactly the wrong medicine,” Cheney said in an interview Thursday with The Associated Press.

Obama has said he wants all combat troops out of Iraq by the spring of 2010, leaving behind a residual force of trainers, air controllers, advisers and logistics soldiers until the end of the mission.

“I hear a lot of people, among our critics, who keep saying `Iraq’s a mess, pull out.’ Well, that’s not true. It’s not a mess,” Cheney said. “We have made major progress. We have come close to achieving a significant proportion of our objectives.”

Cheney said Obama’s decision to keep Robert Gates on as defense secretary makes “some of us cautiously optimistic that the new administration is going to be more reasoned and responsible in terms of how they proceed, and not take action that would undermine the basic fundamental system that we put in place.”

Looking back to the contentious national debate over the war, Cheney said statements from people like Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev., who in April 2007 said the “war is lost,” had a big impact on the Iraqis because it reinforced a belief that the U.S. would bail out.

“If you look at it today, it doesn’t look like we lost in Iraq,” Cheney said. “Harry was wrong.”

Cheney said Bush’s decision to send in roughly 30,000 more troops sent a strong message, a reassurance, to the Iraqis that the U.S. was committed to stay the course. That, he said, dramatically changed the dynamics on the ground.

During the 24-minute interview, he vigorously defended the administration’s terrorist-fighting policies.

Cheney said the administration rightly used programs to intercept communications of suspected terrorists and tough methods to interrogate high-value detainees. He also said he did not have any qualms about the reliability of intelligence obtained through waterboarding—an interrogation technique simulating drowning that was used on three top al-Qaida operatives in 2002 and 2003.

“It’s been used with great discrimination by people who know what they’re doing and has produced a lot of valuable information and intelligence,” he said.

Obama has criticized interrogation practices he says amount to torture and also has promised to close the U.S. detention center at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

On Iran, a nation he called one of the prime sponsors of terror in the world, Cheney said more sanctions likely will be needed to get the Iranians to stop enriching uranium.

“They have continued to aggressively pursue nuclear weapons, in terms of their efforts to enrich uranium to produce fissile materials so they can build a bomb,” Cheney said. “One of the things I worry about most is that linkage between a government that supports terror and terrorists on the one hand, and on the other hand is developing a number of deadlier of weapons. And I think that’s a combination that is a scary prospect, and ought to be.”

In addition, Cheney said: “It looks like North Korea have a continuing, ongoing program to produce highly enriched uranium” and “they helped the Syrians build a nuclear reactor.”

In 2007, Israel bombed the Syrian reactor.

(AP)