Former Vice President Dick Cheney brushed off criticisms of his foreign policy stance from Sen. Rand Paul (R., Ky.), calling the first-term senator an "isolationist" on Sunday.
"I was a strong supporter then of going into Iraq. I'm a strong supporter now. Everybody knows what my position is. There’s nothing to be argued about there. If we spend our time debating what happened 11 or 12 years ago, we're going to miss the threat that is growing and that we do face," Cheney said on "This Week." "Rand Paul, with all due respect, is basically an isolationist. He doesn't believe we ought to be involved in that part of the world. I think it's absolutely essential. One of the things I worried about 12 years ago and that I worry about today, is that there will be another 9/11 attack and that the next time it will be with weapons far deadlier than airline tickets and box cutters."
Cheney authored a Wall Street Journal op-ed last week that lambasted President Barack Obama as weak and ineffective abroad. Paul seemed to disagree with that point in regards to the deteriorating situation in Iraq.
"We’ve left a big vacuum in the Middle East by our withdrawal from Iraq with no stay-behind agreement, by the commitment he made just a couple of weeks ago that we’re going to completely withdraw from Afghanistan with no stay behind agreement. We create a vacuum and it's being filled," Cheney said on "This Week."
Paul said on NBC’s "Meet the Press" that much of the chaos we see today is not because of Obama’s leadership, but because of the Iraq War.
"What's going on now, I don't blame on President Obama," Paul said. "I do blame the Iraq War on the chaos that is in the Middle East. I also blame those who are for the Iraq War for emboldening Iran. These are the same people now petrified of what Iran may become, and I understand some of their worry … what I would say is the war emboldened Iran."
Cheney argued that the president and those who would dither need to face the reality on the ground.
"What I would do now is, among other things, be realistic about the nature of the threat," Cheney said. "When we're arguing over 300 advisers when the request had been for 20,000 in order to do the job right, I'm not sure we have really addressed the problem. I would definitely be helping the resistance up in Syria, in ISIS’s backyard with training and weapons and so forth in order to be able to do a more effective job on that end of the party. … We need an administration to recognize the fact that we’ve got this huge problem, quit peddling the notion that they got core al Qaeda and therefore there’s no problem out there."
Paul called for more discussion.
"There needs to be a full-throated debate, a full-throated debate in Congress, and Congress has to decide," Paul said on CNN’s "State of the Union." "Militarily we could go back in. You know the surge worked. Obviously we have the military might and power, but the country as a whole has to decide do we want to send 100,000 troops in or are we willing to have 4,500 young Americans die to save a city like Mosul that the Shiites won't even save, that they've fled."
When pressed by CNN's Candy Crowley to outline what he would do today, Paul said he would not support ground troops.
"How about air strikes?" Crowley asked.
"I think we need to see what the Shiites will do to defend themselves. If the Shiites are not willing to fight for their country it may be that their country is not going to exist," said Paul.
Crowley pointed out there are time constraints to that kind of plan.
"By the time you… find out how people feel about Iraq, by the time you get Congress to do anything, it’s two weeks later and the ISIS is sitting in Baghdad so you're going to have to move pretty quickly here if you're against air strikes," the anchor said.
Paul reiterated his previous answer.
"There are times when a president would move quickly to dispel an imminent threat to our country, but where I disagree with the president is that his theory in Libya was that there was an imminent threat in Benghazi. That’s not what an imminent threat is, it’s an imminent threat to our country. And so what I would say is the Shiites who are ripping off their uniforms and running need to stand up and fight. Could we assist them in some way? I’m not ruling that out, but I would first wait to see are the Shiites going to fight for their country or not," Paul said.