In an exclusive interview on “This Week” former Vice President Dick Cheney took issue with Sarah Palin’s suggestion that President Obama could help himself politically if he declared war on Iran.

“I don't think a president can make a judgment like that on the basis of politics. The stakes are too high, the consequences too significant to be treating those as simple political calculations,” Cheney said. “When you begin to talk about war, talk about crossing international borders, you talk about committing American men and women to combat, that takes place on a plane clear above any political consideration,” he said in an interview with ABC’s Jonathan Karl.

In an interview last week on Fox News Sunday, Palin said that if Obama "toughen[ed] up" and "secured our nation" people might think differently about him. "Say he decided to declare war on Iran or decide to really come out and do whatever he could to support Israel, which I would like him to do. …[I]f he decided to toughen up…I think people would perhaps shift their thinking a little bit and decide well, maybe he’s tougher than we think he's - than he is today."

Some people are asking, is President Bush's Iraq offensive being driven by the fall election? An idea the vice president calls ``reprehensible.''

"The suggestion that I find reprehensible is the notion that somehow, you know, we saved this and now we've sprung it on them for political reasons," Vice President Dick Cheney said on NBC's "Meet the Press" last week.

But some people in very high places are warning that a life-and-death policy like Iraq "must not be a simple matter of political convenience, " as U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan said Thursday.

What's the political convenience? Strategist Dick Morris spelled it out in a recent column: ``Polls show that only one issue works in Bush's favor: terrorism.''

Even the White House has hinted at a political strategy. As long ago as last January, Bush strategist Karl Rove said, "We can also go to the country on this issue because they trust the Republican Party to do a better job of protecting and strengthening America's military and thereby protecting America."

Why did the Administration wait until September to make its case against Iraq? White House chief of staff Andrew Card told The New York Times last week, ``From a marketing point of view, you don't introduce new products in August.''

When asked by ABC’s Jonathan Karl whether the U.S. government should have had the option to use “enhanced interrogation techniques,” including waterboarding with Umar Farouk Abdulmuttalab, former Vice President Dick Cheney said, “I think you ought to have all of those capabilities on the table.”

“Now, President Obama has taken them off the table. He announced when he came in last year that they would never use anything other than the U.S. Army Manual which doesn’t include those techniques. I think that’s a mistake,” Cheney said.

During Abu Zubaydah's interrogation President Bush learned he was on painkillers for the wounds he suffered during his capture and was therefore difficult to get information from. President Bush exclaimed to then CIA director George Tenet “[w]ho authorized putting him on pain medication?” It would later be reported that Abu Zubaydah was denied painkillers during his interrogation.