“The right response would have been to go in immediately after it had gone down,” Cheney insisted, saying that this could have been accomplished either with a ground invasion aimed at “recovering” the lost drone or by bombing the area until the drone was destroyed.

When pressed on whether or not bombing Iran would have “potentially led us into a war with them” in a later interview, Cheney cited the bombing of a Marine barracks in Beirut in 1983, saying that was “Iranian-supported.”