In the midst of the Iraq war debate, I was asked if George Bush Sr. could have prevented the current debacle by going after Saddam when he had the chance.
As you remember, we had a pretty easy time in Desert Storm and basically dispatched the Iraqi army within the first hundred hours of engagement. They never really put up a defense and either gave up or ran. Our air force caught the remnants jammed on the highway to Baghdad and basically annihilated them; burned out shells of tanks and trucks littered the road.
Many people here said, you got them, now finish the job by going to Baghdad and overthrowing Saddam and his cohorts. Bush Senior declined and called our troops back. Was this a good decision?
Allowing our troops to go after Saddam meant we were invading Iraq and not merely throwing them out of Kuwait. Our Arab coalition partners would have objected and so would have the United Nations; they authorized only freeing Kuwait of Iraqi invaders.
Bush did signal to the Shiites and Kurds in Iraq that this is their chance to overthrow Saddam and when they tried, Saddam crushed them and Bush did nothing to help them; they assumed he would.
Bush was scared that if he had deposed Saddam, neighboring nations like Iran, Syria, Jordan and Saudi Arabia would move into the void and partition Iraq and therefore destabilize the region. Bush thought it would be better to allow Saddam to at least keep Iraq in one piece and stable, even though hundreds of Kurds were gassed and hundreds of Southern Shiites were executed to keep Iraq stable and under his boot.
If Bush Sr. did depose Saddam after Desert Storm the country would have broken up into Kurd, Shiite and Sunni regions and a civil war would have ensued mainly for control of the oil revenues and we now know how the rest of the story would have developed; we are seeing it develop right now.
So Bush Sr. probably made the right decision at that time and he did, belatedly, try to help the Kurds in the north and the Shiites in the south by establishing two (2) “no fly zones”; a little late but at least it was something.
If Bush Junior did not invade Iraq but contained and pressured Saddam while concentrating on wiping out Al Qaeda in Afghanistan and trying to make that country a self reliant democratic nation – well that would be a different story, one that could possible have seen a victory for all concerned but obviously, that is not how it happened.
As you remember, we had a pretty easy time in Desert Storm and basically dispatched the Iraqi army within the first hundred hours of engagement. They never really put up a defense and either gave up or ran. Our air force caught the remnants jammed on the highway to Baghdad and basically annihilated them; burned out shells of tanks and trucks littered the road.
Many people here said, you got them, now finish the job by going to Baghdad and overthrowing Saddam and his cohorts. Bush Senior declined and called our troops back. Was this a good decision?
Allowing our troops to go after Saddam meant we were invading Iraq and not merely throwing them out of Kuwait. Our Arab coalition partners would have objected and so would have the United Nations; they authorized only freeing Kuwait of Iraqi invaders.
Bush did signal to the Shiites and Kurds in Iraq that this is their chance to overthrow Saddam and when they tried, Saddam crushed them and Bush did nothing to help them; they assumed he would.
Bush was scared that if he had deposed Saddam, neighboring nations like Iran, Syria, Jordan and Saudi Arabia would move into the void and partition Iraq and therefore destabilize the region. Bush thought it would be better to allow Saddam to at least keep Iraq in one piece and stable, even though hundreds of Kurds were gassed and hundreds of Southern Shiites were executed to keep Iraq stable and under his boot.
If Bush Sr. did depose Saddam after Desert Storm the country would have broken up into Kurd, Shiite and Sunni regions and a civil war would have ensued mainly for control of the oil revenues and we now know how the rest of the story would have developed; we are seeing it develop right now.
So Bush Sr. probably made the right decision at that time and he did, belatedly, try to help the Kurds in the north and the Shiites in the south by establishing two (2) “no fly zones”; a little late but at least it was something.
If Bush Junior did not invade Iraq but contained and pressured Saddam while concentrating on wiping out Al Qaeda in Afghanistan and trying to make that country a self reliant democratic nation – well that would be a different story, one that could possible have seen a victory for all concerned but obviously, that is not how it happened.
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