Like father, like…. oh, wait
November 4th, 2003 | by aobaoill |This quote has been going around – seemingly coming from the memoirs of George H. W. Bush (that is, the father of the current president of the US):
Trying to eliminate Saddam… would have incurred incalculable human and political costs. Apprehending him was probably impossible… we would have been forced to occupy Baghdad and, in effect, rule Iraq… there was no viable ‘exit strategy’ we could see, violating another of our principles… Going in and occupying Iraq, thus unilaterally exceeding the United Nations’ mandate, would have destroyed the precedent of international response to aggression that we hoped to establish. Had we gone the invasion route, the United States could conceivably still be an occupying power in a bitterly hostile land.
One Response to “Like father, like…. oh, wait”
By buermann on Nov 17, 2003 | Reply
In case you’re unaware of any of this, and pardon my length:
That’s an accurate enough quote that doesn’t speak much to the reality of the first Bush administration’s handling of the situation. There’s the underlying assumption involved that to oust Saddam the US military would need to “march all the way to Baghdad”, as Bill Kristol described the intra-administration debate at the time. This is, as it happens, an untenable position. Kurdish regions successfully created autonomous regions free from the Ba’ath party after the war. In the south the US went to great lengths to prevent the Shi’ite rebellion from succeeding, even withholding access to captured Iraqi arms from rebelling generals and allowing Saddam to fly his gunships to mow down civillians. It might have been necessary to use the airforce to assist, but there was no serious reason not to, considering UK/US forces used the airforce to bomb targets in Iraq on a daily basis for the next twelve years without a UN mandate.
After the rebellions had successfully been crushed, in May, 1991, Bush’s policy changed again towards the goal of regime change “At this juncture, my view is we don’t want to lift these sanctions as long as Saddam Hussein is in power.” The problem was the question of his replacement. From the WP, cited here:
Bush believes “Saddam will quash the rebellions and after the dust settles, the Ba’ath military establishment and other elites will blame him for not only the death and destruction from the war, but the death and destruction from putting down the rebellion. They will emerge then and install a new leadership and will make the case it is time for new leaders and a new beginning.” . . . But this official expressed his own doubts. “There might not be a coup . . . and all these thousands and thousands will be dead while we looked on.”
So supporting another strong-man from the Ba’ath party would have been OK. A popular rebellion and the possibility of a popular government was not. Short of a Ba’athist coup the only other acceptable outcome to the administration was occupation, for which the costs were too high. Allowing Shi’ites access to the tools of rebellion and shooting Saddam’s helicopters out of the sky was not an option, for obvious and deplorable enough reasons of state.