Daddy's Maybe?

The canned reply from Dubya is that "9/11 changed everything" (even though Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11). However, below was his father's assessment of why an invasion was a bad idea.

via juancole.com
George H.W. Bush on Why Invading Iraq was a Bad Idea

George Gedda of AP reminds us of the opposition to an American invasion of Iraq expressed after the Gulf War by George Bush senior and his secretary of state, James Baker. Bush wrote in his memoirs:

' Incalculable human and political costs" would have been the result, the senior Bush has said, if his administration had pushed all the way to Baghdad and sought to overthrow Saddam Hussein after the U.S.-led coalition ousted the Iraqi army from Kuwait during the Persian Gulf war in 1991.

"We would have been forced to occupy Baghdad and, in effect rule Iraq," Bush wrote. "The coalition would have instantly collapsed. ... Going in and thus unilaterally exceeding the United Nations mandate would have destroyed the precedent of international response to aggression 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. It would have been a dramatically different - and perhaps barren - outcome." '

James Baker wrote an op-ed in 1996 that said,

"Iraqi soldiers and civilians could be expected to resist an enemy seizure of their own country with a ferocity not previously demonstrated on the battlefield in Kuwait.

"Even if Hussein were captured and his regime toppled, U.S. forces would still have been confronted with the specter of a military occupation of indefinite duration to pacify the country and sustain a new government in power.

"Removing him from power might well have plunged Iraq into civil war, sucking U.S. forces in to preserve order. Had we elected to march on Baghdad, our forces might still be there."

Somehow I feel as though the world has been dragged into a family squabble between a prodigal son and his father.