Cheney pushes the history eraser button

The rehabilitation of Saddam Hussein is underway. We managed to catch a brief audio clip of a Dick Cheney interview given to Fox News (where else?) on Sunday. Cheney was asked about the prospect of an Iranian-style theocracy in Iraq. A typical report on what he said goes like:

"I think the Iraqis have watched the Iranians operate for years and create a religious theocracy that has been a dismal failure, from the standpoint of the rights of individuals ... And I think there are a great many people involved in the political process in Iraq who will seek some kind of balance."

But wait, there's more. We also heard him add that further proof of Iraq's distaste for Iranian theocracy was that they fought a war against it for eight years in the 1980s *[quote below]. Yes, Saddam's border war with Iran, motivated by territorial greed and opportunism, is now back on the right side of history as a struggle of secularism against theocracy. Which is great for noted Middle East expert Daniel Pipes amongst others, whose only fault was being 17 years early in his recommendation that US policy needed to tilt towards Saddam.

As an addendum, we're having a difficult time right now finding an actual transcript of what Cheney said about the Iran-Iraq war; we're assuming that Fox will publish it later on Sunday, unless the quote is deemed to be a gaffe on the order of Dubya's "erection -- election" stumble of a few weeks ago.

UPDATE: Here's the full quote; note the key sentence, which was deemed worthy of a ... by the Washington Post story above:

I think the Iraqis have watched the Iranians operate for years and create a religious theocracy that has been a dismal failure, from the standpoint of the rights of individuals.
They fought a bloody, eight-year war between the Iraqis and the Iranians against that kind of theocracy.
And I think there are a great many people involved in the political process in Iraq who will seek some kind of balance.