I would....take exception with your assessment that Bush could
have made things better by going after Saddam when he had the chance.I have to give Bush credit. I thought he did the best that could have been done.
I am not sure I agree with my "assessment", either. :-) All I can say that a lot of people do, people who were a lot closer to the Gulf War than I was. One, by the way, is a retired army officer who wrote a letter to the WSJ that Les Horowitz just posted:
We must be prepared to finish what we start. We failed to finish Saddam in 1991. We are paying for that failure now, with interest.
Message 6872244
What deterred Bush and his advisors from "finishing" Saddam was concern that Iraq might then fall apart (as brees has noted) into Kurdish Iraq, Sunni Iraq, and Shiite Iraq. The problem, of course, has been that we have still had to deal with the same old Saddam -- with predictable results. And now both the President and the Congress are talking about getting rid of Saddam. In that case, it might have been better to do it in 1991, than to wait until 1998 or later.
In supporting the decision not to pursue Saddam any further, pez, you write:
I suspect that there would have been grave repercussions around the world had we continued that war any farther.Too many deaths, The picture of the big bad USA invading a Moslem country would not have sat well with Moslems around the world.
But the U.S. forces did enter Iraq, pez! (I would not use the word "invade".) Otherwise, the question of whether to push on to Baghdad would not have come up in the first place. And Kuwait, after all, was a Moslem country. And the Saudis wanted us to get rid of Saddam for them! As I recall, they were very disappointed by the U.S. decision not to do so...
One more point I would like to make, and that concerns U.S. support for the Iraqi opposition. I am not comfortable at all with the legislation (the Iraq Liberation Act) that Republicans introduced Tuesday (the day before the bombing raid began), legislation that calls for giving military assistance to the Iraqi opposition.
There are all kinds of objections that could be made to that, including a) the opposition is seriously split, b) we've been down that road before; and most seriously, in my view, c) it is a violation of the UN Charter and international law in general to openly subsidize the overthrow of the leadership of a country with whom we are not formally at war, and which is a member of the UN.
But I am still wuzzling over all of this...:-)
jbe |
