Way back in 1992, when the world was young and Dick Cheney was sane, here’s what he told the Discovery Institute in Seattle, defending George H.W. Bush’s decision not to invade Iraq:

If we’d gone on to Baghdad, we would have wanted to send a lot of force. One of the lessons we learned was don’t do anythng in a halfhearted fashion … If you go into the streets of Baghdad … all of a sudden you’ve got a battle you’re fighting in a major built-up city, a lot of civilians are around, significant limitations on our ability to use our most effective technologies and techniques …

Once we had rounded him up and gotten rid of his government, then the question is what do you put in its place? You know, you then have accepted the responsibility for governing Iraq …

I would guess if we had gone in there, I would still have forces in Baghdad today. We’d be running the country. We would not have been able to get everybody out and bring everybody home.

And the final point that I think needs to be made is this question of casualties. I don’t think you could have done all of that without significant additional U.S. casualties. And while everybody was tremendously impressed with the low cost of the (1991) conflict, for the 146 Americans who were killed in action and for their families, it wasn’t a cheap war.

And the question in my mind is how many additional American casualties is Saddam (Hussein) worth? And the answer is not that damned many. So, I think we got it right, both when we decided to expel him from Kuwait, but also when the president made the decision that we’d achieved our objectives and we were not going to go get bogged down in the problems of trying to take over and govern Iraq.

As of this week, Cheney and George W. Bush, both draft dodgers themselves, had killed 3,133 Americans and wounded 25,530 more.

Posted by Jerome Doolittle at February 17, 2007 11:00 AM

Email this entry to:


Your email address:


Message (optional):