In an interview with USA Today, President George H.W. Bush sticks up for his son’s disastrous decision to go to war in Iraq,
attacking Iraq war critics as defenders of Saddam’s regime:
“Do they want to bring back Saddam Hussein, these critics?” the elder Bush told USA TODAY in a rare interview. “Do they want to go back to the status quo ante? I don’t know what they are talking about here. Do they think life would be better in the Middle East if Saddam were still there?“
Bush Sr.’s disingenuous attempts to paint Iraq war critics as coddlers of Saddam Hussein are an insult to his own intelligence. After all, Bush Sr. has offered the most cogent explanations for why regime change was a poor strategic decision. In his book, A World Transformed, Bush Sr. argued “incalculable human and political costs
would have resulted from an Iraq invasion in 1991:
“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.”
In 1996, Bush Sr. wrote, “Removing
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.”
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