One of the many striking angles to the White House’s fiasco in Iraq is that the two men in charge — Bush and Cheney — seemed to have a fairly reasonable grasp on Iraq policy before they took office.
The president didn’t have any foreign policy experience before taking office, of course, but as reader R.K. noted via email, not long before becoming president, he had clear opinions about the right course of action when it came to Saddam Hussein.
Sig Christenson, a founding member of Military Reporters and Editors who has worked five assignments in Iraq since the war began, reached back some 10 years for a Veteran’s Day piece that noted President George Bush’s early opposition to an Iraq invasion.
Christenson, who covers the military for the San Antonio (Tex.) Express-News, penned the piece for Sunday’s paper that cited Bush’s comments on Veteran’s Day 1997 as governor of Texas. He pointed to Bush’s defense of his father’s decision during the Gulf War not to remove Saddam Hussein.
“There are a lot of Americans (who say), ‘Why didn’t you go get him?'” Bush told the Express-News back in 1997, according to Christenson. “Well, I’m confident that losing men and women as a result of sniper fire inside of Baghdad would have turned the tide of public opinion very quickly,” Bush added.
Bush said efforts to ferret out Saddam from his many Baghdad hideouts would have transformed the battle from a desert conflict to an unpopular “guerrilla war,” Chistenson recalled.
Predictably, the White House responded by noting that 9/11 changed everything, so Bush getting Iraq right before taking office has no bearing on Bush getting Iraq wrong once in office. It’s not much of an argument — Governor Bush didn’t like quagmires, but President Bush does?
As for Cheney, he really got the policy right in the 1990s. In 1991, Cheney emphasized the intense sectarian rivalries that dominate Iraqi society and the likely inability to maintain stability in Baghdad after a war. As for replacing Saddam with a democracy, Cheney asked his audience, “How much credibility is that government going to have if it’s set up by the United States military when it’s there?” He added:
“The notion that we ought to now go to Baghdad and somehow take control of the country strikes me as an extremely serious one in terms of what we’d have to do once we got there. You’d probably have to put some new government in place. It’s not clear what kind of government that would be, how long you’d have to stay. For the U.S. to get involved militarily in determining the outcome of the struggle over who’s going to govern in Iraq strikes me as a classic definition of a quagmire.”
Then, in 1994, Cheney reiterated his position.
“Once you got to Iraq and took it over, and took down Saddam Hussein’s government, then what are you going to put in its place? That’s a very volatile part of the world and if you take down the central government in Iraq, you can easily end up seeing pieces of Iraq fly off. How many additional dead Americans is Saddam worth? And our judgment was – not very many and I think we got it right.”
As ThinkProgress noted a while back, Cheney was repeating the line as recently as 2000:
“[T]he only way you could have done that would be to go to Baghdad and occupy Iraq. If we’d done that, the U.S. would have been all alone. We would not have had the support of the coalition, especially of the Arab nations that fought alongside us in Kuwait. None of them ever set foot inside Iraq. Conversations I had with leaders in the region afterwards–they all supported the decision that was made not to go to Baghdad.
“They were concerned that we not get into a position where we shifted instead of being the leader of an international coalition to roll back Iraqi aggression to one in which we were an imperialist power, willy-nilly moving into capitals in that part of the world taking down governments.”
Those guys sure were smart, weren’t they?