Ok, history and military buffs. Crank up your “What if…” machine and tell us what would have happened if Papa Bush had let Stormin’ Norman and Colin Powell push in to Iraq and bring down Saddam at the end of Operation Desert Storm in 1991? Since there was already a UN coalition that opposed him and his Republican Guard was decimated it would have been relatively straightforward. Would Hussein’s elimination at that time, especially with a Saudi support (the house of Saud backed the coalition), been looked upon favorably by other Arab states? What about the Taliban growing in power in Afghanistan?
Mods: if this is in the wrong place please move it.
As I recall, and forgive me if I am mistaken as I was in a place in the world with very poor news media access (but on the good side I missed most of the Lee Greenwood mania), the UN, and/or Arab/Muslim nations were unified in ousting the Iraqi forces from Kuwait, NOT in overthrowing Iraq. Which is why we stopped after 100 hours of ground offense, and did not press on while we had the initiative. Pressing on would have had great opposition within the region. Again, I may be misinformed.
The reason they didn’t was largely because of the question of what you replace him with. What sort of government would our allies and the people of the US support? That’s a big can of worms all by itself. Just as much of a problem is how you would put it in place and enforce it. I think Bush I saw that it would require a long and expensive US occupying presence, and he wanted to avoid that.
Regional support would have disappeared as soon as the new mission was announced. The Saudis, the Egyptians, and the Syrians were dictatorial regimes. They were fighting to prevent the overthrow of the dictatorial regime in Kuwait. They would not have supported the overthrow of a dictatorial regime in Iraq. They were fighting for the status quo not to change it.
Plus the whole Shia / Sunni thing. Each of the Arab coalition members has their own variant of that sectarian problem.
As subsequent events in Iraq have painfully demonstrated, that little issue is one of those cans of worms better left thoroughly repressed. At least if your sole measure of “better” is “Continued near-term stability in favor of the current ruling group.”
Iraq was a handy buffer between Saudi Arabia and Iran. As evil as Saddam was, his ruthlessness kept the radical groups under control. G.H.W. Bush knew that toppling Saddam would destabilise the region and cause more problems than it solved.
I don’t think we really need a ‘what if’. We’ve seen what would have happened.
Hmm, I’m so inured to interstitial ads that my brain didn’t even register or process the opening graphics. I just saw “opening ad/spam/bullshit” and mentally blurred it out.
My favorite was James Baker. Unfortunately I can’t find the direct quote but he essentially said he spend ten years defending the decision not to occupy Iraq but he doesn’t have to defend it anymore.
We’d have been doing it basically alone. I’m not sure even the other European allies would have supported us, and it would have caused a huge amount of ill will in the region and probably in Europe and throughout the world if we had (pretty much what we got when we actually invaded).
That said, I don’t think it would have been a repeat of what happened in Gulf War II, electric boogaloo. For one thing, the military force we had during the first Gulf War dwarfed even the combined military of us and our allies in the second GW. That alone would have meant we actually COULD secure most or all of the oil and infrastructure sites and occupy Iraq in a meaningful way. Also, Saddam et al had just suffered a body blow and their military was pretty much completely demoralized…even the elite units had just gotten their heads handed to them and were totally on the ropes. You had the Kurds ready to rebel, the common people shocked and the main thing was you DIDN’T have Sadam et al with years to build up a paramilitary force (i.e. no Fedayeen and no huge stockpile of stashed away weapons, arms and ammo). I think Saddam and his merry men would have crumpled like a beer can at that point…it would have been like the end of the Kaddaffi Duck’s reign (IMHO), with someone shooting him in the back of the head and stringing up his kids and anyone else associated with the regime.
So, IMHO (since this is IMHO and all :p), Iraq would have been much easier to conquer AND to occupy. We’d have had a more skilled and less fragmented US leadership (Bush the elder and his merry men were lightyears ahead of his kid and his team), we’d have had a lot more military force and faced a much more fragmented opposition, if there was any at all, at least initially. Also…no AQ, at least not the AQ that we faced during the second GW.
All of that said, the US would have lost a lot of credibility (pretty much what we DID lose in the second GW…maybe more, since we would have betrayed the alliance we basically built) and gotten a lot of ill will and bad feelings. We’d have also needed to figure out the Kurdish situation and how to build a new Iraqi government (here I think Bush I et al would have been a LOT better suited to the task), and the wild card is how would the American public reacted (I think positively actually, since the build up of Saddam The Evil was pretty well done in the build up to war, and the lightning victories in the early phase would have carried us through a transition to invasion).