Dick Cheney quote on Saddam/Iraq

Quote of the day:

"The question in my mind is how many additional American casualties is Saddam worth?... And the answer is not very damned many. So I think we got it right, both when we decided to expel him from Kuwait, but also when the president made the decision that we'd achieved our objectives and we were not going to go get bogged down in the problems of trying to take over and govern Iraq.... All of a sudden you've got a battle you're fighting in a major built-up city, a lot of civilians are around, significant limitations on our ability to use our most effective technologies and techniques.... Once we had rounded him up and gotten rid of his government, then the question is what do you put in its place? You know, you then have accepted the responsibility for governing Iraq.... Now what kind of government are you going to establish? Is it going to be a Kurdish government, or a Shi'ia government, or a Sunni government, or maybe a government based on the old Baathist Party, or some mixture thereof? You will have, I think by that time, lost the support of the Arab coalition that was so crucial to our operations over there."

-Dick Cheney, speaking about the Gulf War in 1992

Who said the following: < quote > Clinton, Kerry, Carter?

Let them fall for the trap and then Wham!

It does give one pause. What happened, greed, power,...?

This is courtesy of shraby in GD.

"UN documents show that Halliburton's affiliates have had controversial dealings with the Iraqi regime during Cheney's tenure at the company and played a part in helping Saddam Hussein illegally pocket billions of dollars under the UN's oil-for-food program. The Clinton administration blocked one deal Halliburton was trying to push through because it was "not authorized under the oil-for-food deal," according to UN documents. That deal, between Halliburton subsidiary Ingersoll Dresser Pump Co. and Iraq, included agreements by the firm to sell nearly $1 million in spare parts, compressors and firefighting equipment to refurbish an offshore oil terminal, Khor al-Amaya. Still, Halliburton used one of its foreign subsidiaries to sell Iraq the equipment it needed so the country could pump more oil, according to a report in the Washington Post in June 2001.

The Halliburton subsidiaries, Dresser-Rand and Ingersoll Dresser Pump Co., sold water and sewage treatment pumps, spare parts for oil facilities and pipeline equipment to Baghdad through French affiliates from the first half of 1997 to the summer of 2000, UN records show. Ingersoll Dresser Pump also signed contracts – later blocked by the United States, according to the Post – to help repair an Iraqi oil terminal that U.S.-led military forces destroyed in the Gulf War years earlier."

(more)
<http://www.antiwar.com/orig/leopold.php?articleid=3767 >

Maybe it was an attempt to co-opt Sadam with American capitalism that went way, way bad.

if Poppy had won in '92, things might have turned out a lot different in Iraq.