<<That campaign was a joke from a purely military standpoint in that it failed to destroy the main enemy army when that army was clearly in the grasp of the Allied forces. If loss of life were at that point the issue then they could have taken the whole republican guards prisoner and made them POWs.
Once again political expedience - combined with a lack of stomach on the part of the "heroes" of the war - kept the military from accomplishing what would have been its mission in a war outside of power politics - the destruction of the Replican guard>>
From a military standpoint it was an outstanding success. The goal was to remove Iraqi forces from Kuwait, that is what we got UNSC authorization to do, that is what we built the coalition upon. We achieved that goal in under 100 hours of ground pounding. As to taking the whole republican guard POW, well, that is dependent upon how they feel about the matter as well! <g>
Yes it would have made things easier to remove Saddam and simply leave. However, the Arab coalition would have collapsed on the road to Baghdad, the UN would have withdrawn support, and the Saudis would have kicked us out of Arabia giving us no ground for operations. The US does not simply pull its war machine out of a hat in the midst of a war zone. The US needs a staging area to build up the logistics and support elements to maintain a very cumbersome machine. That is precisely why the US always seeks coalitions, it cant operate out of thin air. And thats why we would have been up a creek if the Arabs withdrew. In addition, there is not a credible replacement for Saddam, the cure would have been worse than the disease. It is a broad national US interest to keep Iran in check, and for that Iraq has fit the bill historically. It was not in US interest to dissolve Iraq and risk not only an exportation of the Shiite Revolution, but the ascendency of Iran as master of the Gulf. Its a choice of evils, and Saddam is the lesser of the two. |
