In an interview with author Stephen Hayes on August 22, 2006, Vice President Dick Cheney said, regarding regime change in the Middle East: ” ‘Certainly up through my time as secretary of defense, I would not have been as staunch an advocate as I am now of the importance of the reform process in that part of the world,’ he acknowledges. ‘You used to be able to look at that region and, you know, we were interested in it because we got a lot of oil out of it. And that was important from the standpoint of the economy. But it didn’t constitute any kind of direct threat to the United States. Americans weren’t going to die based on who was governing Iraq or most other places over there. That changed on 9/11, in my mind.’ ”
– Stephen F. Hayes, Cheney, Page 473