Subject: An indictment of #### in quotes!

[BikeWriter]

"Trying to eliminate Saddam...would have incurred incalculable human and political costs. Apprehending him was probably impossible.... We would have been forced to occupy Baghdad and, in effect, rule Iraq.... There was no viable "exit strategy" we could see, violating another of our principles. Furthermore, we had been consciously trying to set a pattern for handling aggression in the post-Cold War world. Going in and occupying Iraq, thus unilaterally exceeding the United Nations' mandate, would have destroyed the precedent of international response to aggression that 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."
George Herbert Walker Bush,in his memoir, "A World Transformed"


<http://www.thenation.com/edcut/index.mhtml?bid=7&pid=10... >

"We know there are rifts inside the Bush Administration, but what about the growing rift between Presidents 41 and 43? Even before the Iraq war, the schism between father and son wasn't hard to conceal. The former President (via associates like Brent Scowcroft) clearly disapproved of W's repudiation of traditional conservative internationalism in favor of adventurist neo-con extremism. (Remember Scowcroft's oped of August 2002 in which he argued that preemptive war against Iraq was an unwarranted and divisive distraction from the fight against global terrorism?) I think that the proposition of going to Baghdad is also fallacious. I think if we were going to remove Saddam Hussein we would have had to go all the way to Baghdad, we would have to commit a lot of force… And once we'd done that and we'd gotten rid of Saddam Hussein and his government, then we'd have had to put another government in its place… it would have been a mistake for us to get bogged down in the quagmire inside Iraq."
Cheney speech at the Soref Symposium, April 29, 1991.

If Reagan "doesn't really cut defense, he becomes the No. 1 special pleader in town...The severity of the deficit is great enough that the president has to reach out and take a whack at everything to be credible...If you're going to rule out the other two , then you've got to hit defense."
- Dick Cheney, House leader, quoted in the Washington Post, 12/16/84


<http://www.nytimes.com/2003/12/23/international/middlee... >
As a special envoy </b></font></a> for the Reagan administration in 1984, Donald H. Rumsfeld, now the defense secretary, traveled to Iraq to persuade officials there that the United States was eager to improve ties with President Saddam Hussein despite his use of chemical weapons, newly declassified documents show.
Mr. Rumsfeld, who ran a pharmaceutical company at the time, was tapped by Secretary of State George P. Shultz to reinforce a message that a recent move to condemn Iraq's use of chemical weapons was strictly in principle and that America's priority was to prevent an Iranian victory in the Iran-Iraq war and to improve bilateral ties.


"We should not march into Baghdad. To occupy Iraq would instantly shatter our coalition, turning the whole Arab world against us, and make a broken tyrant into a latter-day Arab hero...assigning young soldiers to a fruitless hunt for a securely entrenched dictator and condemning them to fight in what would be an unwinnable urban guerrilla war. It could only plunge that part of the world into even greater instability."
George H.W. Bush, in his book "A World Transformed."


A transcript of the 1992 appearance was tracked down by P-I columnist Joel Connelly, as reported in today's In the Northwest column.
"And the question in my mind is how many additional American casualties is Saddam worth?" Cheney said then in response to a question.
"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."
<http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/national/192908_cheney29.... >


We know the answer; for in 1992 the general himself offered us an example of the "logical process" he had in mind, analyzing why President George H. W. Bush did not order our forces to take Baghdad in 1991:
"We must assume that the political objective of such an order would have been capturing Saddam Hussein," he wrote. "What purpose would it have served? And would serving that purpose have been worth the many more casualties that would have occurred? Would it have been worth the inevitable follow-up: major occupation forces in Iraq for years to come and a very expensive and complex American proconsulship in Baghdad? Fortunately for America, reasonable people at the time thought not."
General Colin Powell
<http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/21/opinion/21danner.html... >