Cheney's prescience

This is the transcript of a portion of an interview at the American Enterprise Institute, April 15, 1994, in which then former Secretary of Defense Cheney was asked about the decision not to invade Iraq during the 1991 Gulf War.

Q. Do you think the U.S. or U.N. forces should have moved into Baghdad?

Cheney: No.

Q: Why not?

Cheney: Because if we’d gone to Baghdad we would have been all alone. There wouldn’t have been anybody else with us. It would have been a U.S. occupation of Iraq, and none of the Arab forces that would have been willing to fight with us in Kuwait would have been willing to invade Iraq.

Once you got to Iraq and took it over and took down Saddam Hussein’s government, and 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 of Iraq you can easily end up seeing pieces of Iraq fly off. Part of it, the Syrians would like to have to the west. Part of eastern Iraq, the Iranians would like to claim; they fought them for eight years. In the north, you’ve got the Kurds. And if the Kurds spin loose and join with the Kurds in Turkey, then you threaten the territorial integrity of Turkey. It’s a quagmire if you go that far and try to take Iraq.

Another thing is casualties. Everyone was impressed with the fact that we were able to do our job [in Gulf War I] with as few casualties as we had. But for the 146 Americans killed in action and for their families, it wasn’t a cheap war. And the question for the President, in terms of whether or not we went on to Baghdad and took additional casualties in an effort to get Saddam Hussein, was how many additional dead Americans was Saddam worth? And our judgment was, not very many, and I think we got it right.

Note: this was originally posted on ketches, yaks & hawks 16 August 2007