In an interview in 1994, Dick Cheney defended the decision not to take out Saddam. He said it would have been a quagmire, we would have taken too many casualties, and it was unclear who or what we could replace Saddam’s regime with.
This clip should have been all over the news in the lead-up to the war, but it wasn’t. I don’t recall Cheney or anyone else ever having to answer for this quote. As far as I know, nobody asked Cheney to his face why he changed his mind. I never saw a single instance of a Bush administration official or shill being confronted with, “In 1994, Cheney said this. Was he wrong?”
What I thought in 1991 was that Bush should have continued to degrade Iraqi military for a few more days, while letting the Baathists know that cease-fire would happen when Saddam accepted exile or was eliminated. I am not talking of advancing on Baghdad, just engaging top enemy troops in the South. Either way, I’d have cut off the campaign after eight days or so, instead of Bush’s four.
At worst, this would have led to the actual case, but with Saddam having less strength to punish a Shi’ite uprising, as in fact he did do.
More likely, Baathists leaders would have seen the benefit of killing or urging Saddam to exile. Yes, they’d end up with another strongman, possibly from the same al-Tikriti clan, but any change from Saddam would have been a big improvement.
Having failed to take this step when it was easily within grasp, of course there was no excuse for mounting the 2003 Desert Shock and Awe.
Regime change in Iraq became an official US policy goal under Clinton. See Iraq Liberation Act: formulated during Clinton but used a justification under Bush.
The removal of Saddam Hussein was a top agenda item for the new Bush administration in January 2001. Bush Sought 'Way' To Invade Iraq? - CBS News
"And what happened at President Bush’s very first National Security Council meeting is one of O’Neill’s most startling revelations.
“From the very beginning, there was a conviction, that Saddam Hussein was a bad person and that he needed to go,” says O’Neill, who adds that going after Saddam was topic “A” 10 days after the inauguration - eight months before Sept. 11."
"And that came up at this first meeting, says O’Neill, who adds that the discussion of Iraq continued at the next National Security Council meeting two days later.
He got briefing materials under this cover sheet. “There are memos. One of them marked, secret, says, ‘Plan for post-Saddam Iraq,’” adds Suskind, who says that they discussed an occupation of Iraq in January and February of 2001.
Oil
"Based on his interviews with O’Neill and several other officials at the meetings, Suskind writes that the planning envisioned peacekeeping troops, war crimes tribunals, and even divvying up Iraq’s oil wealth.
He obtained one Pentagon document, dated March 5, 2001, and entitled “Foreign Suitors for Iraqi Oilfield contracts,” which includes a map of potential areas for exploration.
“It talks about contractors around the world from, you know, 30-40 countries. And which ones have what intentions,” says Suskind. “On oil in Iraq.”"
**
Immediately following 9/11**, Bush sought “any shred” of evidence that Iraq could be “linked in any way.”"
Part of it was likely personal. Everything I’ve read about his personality suggests he has a mafia’s thirst for vengeance against anyone who attacks his family. So I don’t doubt that a part of him wanted to see Hussein’s neck in a noose for the plot to go after his father.
I’m not sure how eager George W Bush was to go after Hussein ideologically. That push was more from Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, and Perle. They laid out the rationale and Bush bought into it, and this was particularly true after 9/11.
The 9/11 experience can’t be overlooked because it gave the nation and enemy and gave the president a blank check to go after pretty much anyone deemed supporting it. There was no definition of the nemesis though, just anyone that the president and his men claimed it to be.
I doubt that they really believed Saddam still had stockpiles of WMDs. Could Hussein have produced crude dirty weaponry in mobile labs? Could he buy nasty stuff on the black market? Maybe, but who couldn’t? Hussein was prosecuted in the American media mostly because of his past sins.
Having said that, Hussein was also a pain in the ass. He advocated and occasionally engaged in hostility against Israel. His regime was able to get around sanctions at the expense of his own people. And he regularly taunted the US and allies. He was an annoyance.
Let’s also not overlook overconfidence. The Bush officials were simply not realistic in their assessment of what it would take to invade, occupy, and rebuild Iraq. They clearly had the power to destroy a largely conventional military opponent, as they had demonstrated already in 1991 (not to mention they had been weakened considerably since then). But occupying the land and conquering its people was a different test altogether, and one that they failed miserably.
I am not sure where you’re getting your misinformation, but your second paragraph had already been debunked months before the invasion.
Hussein had already gotten rid of the weapons before the second set of inspections by the UN beginning in November, 2002. His nuclear program was a joke and every time the Bush administration tried to prove he was engaged in research, their claims were debunked by the IAEA.
Repeating the administration lies 15 years after they had been disproved is silly.
Regarding Hussein’s possession of WMD: The UNMOVIC and the IAEA could find no evidence of any efforts to build or store WMD and, as I already noted, the invading forces did not even try to secure the locations where the administration claimed Hussein had such weapons, indicating that we already knew that there were no longer any in Iraqi hands.
A year or so into the occupation, we actually stumbled over a munitions dump that had gas canisters, sparking cries of “See! We told you!” by some supporters of the invasion, (although without similar comments from the Bush administration). Upon examination, it was determined that they were left over from the Iran war, had not been maintained, were not capable of being used as weapons, and were more a danger to any nearby villages than they were to any targets of war.
The Kuwait invasion demonstrated to Hussein that the U.S. and UK were willing to go to war if he tried any further assaults upon his neighbors and the no-fly zones were already protecting the Kurds and people in southern Iraq who had rebelled at the end of the First Gulf War.
The notion of Hussein being a serious threat to any of his neighbors, much less to the U.S., was utter nonsense.
I’d like to see a credible cite for the “thousands” figure, but yes, everybody acknowledges that he used gas on the Kurds. Even before we invaded, the line was, “We know he has chemical weapons, because we have the receipts.”
But that was in the 80’s, when Saddam was Our Boy fighting against those evil Iranians, so we didn’t care. There are famous quotes of Reagan and Cheney supporting him during the time he used them, and of Rumsfeld visiting Iraq and shaking his hand as Reagan’s envoy.
The shelf life of those weapons is only a few years, and there is no evidence he built any after the 80’s, so they are irrelevant to 2003. And at least Saddam didn’t shoot down a civilian Iranian airliner and kill all 300 people on board, like we did.
Very likely. That’s why nobody proposed leaving him unchecked. For example, in the report I cited a week or two ago, Hans Blix recommended the continued presence of UN inspectors, which would have cost approximately a trillion dollars and untold thousands of lives less than invading.
I think that the Admin et al believed that they’d be improving the ME.
There were multiple Iranian, Iraqi, and Israeli voices encouraging the belief of the Bush Admin members et al.
The Bush Admin expected the civil structure of Iraq to hold.
Rumsfeld expected we’d be out of Iraq by September 2003.
Bush Admin wanted to replace the Iraqi regime with the regime they each imagined.
Subsequent to that, they convened council on how to sell the invasion to the public.
They settled on the threat of Iraqi WMD in the hands of al Queda.
There were other reasons and selling points, but the terrorist/WMD threat was the selling point the Bush Admin thought would motivate the country to send its young men to war.
This quick, easy cake-walk which would remake the ME in friendlier, healthier image was what the Bush Admin felt was worth the intentional fudging they had to do to make Iraq look like a threat worth spending blood on.
I think there were probably several motivations, not only different motivations for different people, but I think that several individuals in that administration had multiple motivations.
I believe that at least one motivation of George W. Bush himself was to set himself up as a successful “war president,” to parlay a popular war into a successful re-election. That was to make up for his father’s failure to do that. And he also wanted to legitimize himself with his re-election. I think he did feel the sting of the way he won in 2000.
I think the most important reason was from the Rumsfeld/Cheney faction. They had spent decades thinking of themselves as the smartest kids on the block, the most hard-headed, the most realistic, and they thought they could play this game of geopolitical chess perfectly.
They thought they knew exactly what they were doing, and that when they were done they would have permanently changed the political situation in the Middle East to have a U.S. puppet state in Iraq, with a secure source of oil, that could act as a buffer to quell Iran’s ambitions and to snuff out religious extremism.
I really think they thought they could do it in their sleep, which is why they rejected all advice for adequate levels of force and occupation planning. They really thought of themselves as geniuses and badasses and that the only reason that no one else in the American power structure was doing it was because they were weak-minded pussies.
Hubris, over-confidence, excessive self regard. That was a huge huge part of what was going on. They thought that they were the only ones who could see the world clearly. They could not even imagine being wrong about the world.
And the election of George W. Bush and 9/11 gave them what they saw as the perfect opportunity to push it through. They knew what they wanted to do from the beginning; it was just a matter of finding the right excuse.
Cheney and Rumsfeld were one part of the equation, but the real ideological energy and zeal for the remaking of Iraq came from others like Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, etc. And I’m sure that there were others as well. It wasn’t just about privatizing and controlling the oil; the privatization experiment was tried in other facets of Iraq’s economy as well. Iraq began as an experiment in radical privatization, to see what a country might look like if it were tried where they could make the regulations up as they went along. Predictably, it failed like a mother fucker.
I think that was certainly a factor, by I don’t think that would have been enough to actually get the project moving. Those guys were given their free hand once the boots were on the ground, but the boots got there because of Rumsfeld and Cheney’s Masters of the Universe act. I don’t even think it was primarily because of the oil, but just because they really believed they could completely alter the world’s politics in one fell swoop and establish a permanent American hegemony in the Middle East, and they thought they could do it in a cakewalk. These were guys who had been telling themselves for decades that they were the only people in the world to understand how the world really worked.
That statement is incorrect. Pretty much everyone at that point in time believed Saddam had the WMDs. Most conclusive proof was that he used them on his own people.
That simply isn’t true. There were many people contradicting that viewpoint at the time. There were, however, some Bush supporters insisting that “everyone knows” or “nobody disputes” Saddam has WMDs. But they were lying, and simply pretending the people disputing them didn’t exist. In the post-9/11 political climate, it was practically impossible for anyone critical of the administration (at least as regards foreign policy/war/terrorism) to be taken seriously.
That was fine for the initial effort to drum up support for the war, but it had already been proven to be false by the time the troops were sent in to invade the country. From November, 2002 through March, 2003, (when the UN and IAEA pulled out their inspectors to keep from being killed by Bush and Blair’s air assaults), all the evidence found showed that Hussein had actually disarmed Iraq of the gas weapons that he had used against Iran and against Iraqi rebels…
This has been pointed out in this thread, already. Please do not keep repeating the lies of the Bush administration 14 years after they were shown to be lies.
Maybe it slipped your notice but the dictator who invaded Kuwait was not left unchecked. He was checked in 1991 and his stockpile of WMD’s were destroyed.
So what justification was there to invade Iraq in 2003?
