James, the assurance of your cynicism sometimes approaches Gustave's... Saddam was left in power because:
a. The coalition that Bush had assembled would have fallen apart had we marched on Baghdad;
b. Bush did not have the stomach or political capital for a lengthy occupation;
c. There was a fear that the Iranians would use Saddam's difficulties to advance their own interests;
d. The Turks would not have tolerated the creation of a rump Kurdistan out of a fractured Iraq, given their own Kurdish problem;
e. It was thought that the failure of Saddam's policy would lead ambitious members of the government to overthrow him. Such plots, in all likelihood, existed. Certainly Saddam thought so, and killed quite a few of his top people, including members of his family, as a result. What was not expected was the resilience of the regime, and the brutal effeciency with which the twin insurgencies, Shi'ite and Kurdish, were put down. The Administration expected to force concessions from a successor regime... |
