Saddam condemned to die (and what the Dick Cheney of old said about going after him)

[lwcon]

Details here


Through the miracles of time travel and wikiquote, a younger Dick Cheney weighs in on the idea of killing Iraq in order to kill Saddam Hussein:

I think that the proposition of going to Baghdad is also fallacious. I think if we we're 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 because I do not believe he would wait in the Presidential Palace for us to arrive. I think we'd have had to hunt him down. 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. What kind of government? Should it be a Sunni government or Shi'i government or a Kurdish government or Ba'athist regime? Or maybe we want to bring in some of the Islamic fundamentalists? How long would we have had to stay in Baghdad to keep that government in place? What would happen to the government once U.S. forces withdrew? How many casualties should the United States accept in that effort to try to create clarity and stability in a situation that is inherently unstable? I think it is vitally important for a President to know when to use military force. I think it is also very important for him to know when not to commit U.S. military force. And it's my view that the President got it right both times, that it would have been a mistake for us to get bogged down in the quagmire inside Iraq.
o At the Washington Institute's Soref Symposium, April 29, 1991

And the question in my mind is how many additional American casualties is Saddam worth? 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.... Once we had rounded him up and gotten rid of his government, then the question is what do you put in its place? You know, you then have accepted the responsibility for governing Iraq.
o August 1992, at the Discovery Institute in Seattle

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[lwcon]

1. Video of Rumsfeld shaking hands with SH *after* the events...

... for which he was convicted today (video w/o audio):

http://youtube.com/watch?v=WJUmhtmKttM

http://norbizness.com/archives/001917.html

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Hey, the liberal light is always on at the Vast Left-Wing Conspiracy. Please stop by and say "hi!"