http://www.guardian.co.uk/uslatest/story/0,1282,-4449660,00.html
Bush's Father Foresaw Costs of Iraq War
Wednesday August 25, 2004 7:16 AM
By GEORGE GEDDA
Associated Press Writer
WASHINGTON (AP) - Not many people foresaw the postwar difficulties the
administration has endured in Iraq. Of the few who did, two stand out, both
lions of the Republican Party.
One was President George H.W. Bush. The other was his secretary of state,
James A. Baker.
``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.''
The senior Bush's thoughts are outlined in ``A World Transformed,''
published well before his son became president. After Desert Storm, the
nation was deeply split over whether Bush was right to bring the troops home
while leaving Saddam's regime intact.
Although the political context of the region at the time was different from
what the incumbent President Bush faced in 2003, the father's predictions
about a post-Iraq war situation were eerily prescient.
Baker had a similar view on the perils of a regime change policy in Iraq
after Desert Storm.
In a September 1996 opinion piece, he said, ``Iraqi soldiers and civilians
could be expected to resist an enemy seizure of their own country with a
ferocity not previously demonstrated on the battlefield in Kuwait.
``Even if Hussein were captured and his regime toppled, U.S. forces would
still have been confronted with the specter of a military occupation of
indefinite duration to pacify the country and sustain a new government in
power.
``Removing him 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.''
Seven years after Baker wrote those words, in 2003, the political situation
in the region had changed dramatically. As the incumbent administration saw
it, Saddam had systematically ignored for 12 years U.N. Security Council
demands that he eliminate his weapons of mass destruction.
Also, the administration believed, perhaps wrongly, that Saddam had
reconstituted weapons programs that had been uncovered and destroyed since
1991.
So the Iraq war that former President Bush chose not to fight in 1991 was
carried out by his son in 2003, and cast by the current President Bush as
part of the global war on terrorism that had begun with the Sept. 11, 2001,
attacks 18 months earlier.
Saddam was perceived - at least by the current President Bush - as a far
greater menace in 2003 than he had been in 1991 when the senior Bush was
content with liberating Kuwait and foregoing regime change in Baghdad.
The current President Bush undoubtedly was warned about the possibility of
heavy U.S. troop casualties in the 2003 war. But one wonders whether those
warnings were as clear-sighted as those of Baker when he wrote about the
perils of ousting Saddam militarily.
If that had been the policy in 1991, Baker said, it ``would certainly have
resulted in substantially greater casualties to American forces than (Desert
Storm) itself. For this reason, our military and the president's senior
advisers were properly dead-set against it.''
Defense Department figures show that, as of Tuesday, 109 U.S. soldiers died
during the 2003 Iraq war as a result of hostile action, compared with 611
since Bush declared an end to major combat actions in Iraq on May 1, 2003.
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