Read this excerpt from an insightful article about Kerry Called Damage Control by PHILIP GOUREVITCH.
The book, “A World Transformed,” was written by the first President Bush and his national-security adviser, Brent Scowcroft, and the page in question describes why Bush the father left Saddam Hussein in power at the end of the Gulf War. To eliminate him would have incurred “incalculable human and political costs,” they claimed. “We would have been forced to occupy Baghdad and, in effect, rule Iraq. The coalition would instantly have collapsed, the Arabs deserting it in anger and other allies pulling out as well. . . . Furthermore, we had been self-consciously trying to set a pattern for handling aggression in the post-Cold War world. Going in and occupying Iraq, 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.”
The book, “A World Transformed,” was written by the first President Bush and his national-security adviser, Brent Scowcroft, and the page in question describes why Bush the father left Saddam Hussein in power at the end of the Gulf War. To eliminate him would have incurred “incalculable human and political costs,” they claimed. “We would have been forced to occupy Baghdad and, in effect, rule Iraq. The coalition would instantly have collapsed, the Arabs deserting it in anger and other allies pulling out as well. . . . Furthermore, we had been self-consciously trying to set a pattern for handling aggression in the post-Cold War world. Going in and occupying Iraq, 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.”
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