Sometimes it’s not such a bad idea to listen to your father..;-)
Posted : August 25, 2004 at 10:48 am [America/Los_Angeles]
[via Bush’s Father Foresaw Costs of Iraq War]
…
Not many people foresaw the postwar difficulties the administration has endured in Iraq. Of the few who did, two stand out, both lions of the Republican Party.One was President George H.W. Bush. The other was his secretary of state, James A. Baker.
“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.”
…
Baker had a similar view on the perils of a regime change policy in Iraq after Desert Storm.In a September 1996 opinion piece, he 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.”
I can’t comment much on how good or bad a president former president George H. W. Bush was. I was in India at the time and was young and stupid who could care less about the political chaos in India, let alone United States or the World. However, the few times that I have seen him on television since I came to US, I’ve always found him a likeable person and a gentleman. This might sound absurd, but I would pick him over his son any day of the week and twice on a Sunday!
Personal Confession:
Of the many things that draws me to people, especially political figures, their intellectual capacity is definitely very high on my list.
Now that would definitely explain a lot of my posts in the recent past, wouldn’t it 
- Anand
Category: United (or not) State of American Politics 2004