The myth of Icarus redux? I’ve just been made aware of an article that George Bush, Sr, and his National Security advisor, Brent Scowcroft, published in 1998, on the subject of why they decided not to go into Iraq at the conclusion of the Gulf War:
President Bush repeatedly declared that the fate of Saddam Hussein was up to the Iraqi people. Occasionally, he indicated that removal of Saddam would be welcome, but for very practical reasons there was never a promise to aid an uprising. While we hoped that popular revolt or coup would topple Saddam, neither the U.S. nor the countries of the region wished to see the breakup of the Iraqi state. We were concerned about the long-term balance of power at the head of the Gulf. Trying to eliminate Saddam, extending the ground war into an occupation of Iraq, would have violated our guideline about not changing objectives in midstream, engaging in “mission creep,” and would have incurred incalculable human and political costs. Apprehending him was probably impossible. We had been unable to find Noriega in Panama, which we knew intimately. 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. Under those circumstances, 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 U.N.’s mandate, would have destroyed the precedent of international response to aggression we hoped to establish. Had we gone the invasion route, the U.S. could conceivably still be an occupying power in a bitterly hostile land. It would have been a dramatically different–and perhaps barren–outcome.
I suppose you could make the argument that the situation is different this time around, because there’s evidence Iraq was cooperating with al-Qaida, and might have intended to supply them with weapons of mass destruction. But you’d be lying. The “proof” that Saddam and Osama were friendly was and is nonexistent, as are — so far — the WMDs.
So you can add George Jr’s dad to the long list of people who predicted that really bad stuff would happen if we tried to go into Iraq. Icarus didn’t listen to his father either, but Icarus didn’t have an entire country strapped to his back when he fell out of the sky.