Father Knows Best

I was cleaning out old email today (having a mail box that shuts down when I reach 100 MB forces me to do this regularly) and I came across a message that a friend send me in August 2004 about the Iraq War.

I can't believe how prescient this was! If only W had taken time to listen to his daddy.

In his memoir, "A World Transformed," written in 1999, George H. W. Bush wrote the following to explain why he didn't go after Saddam Hussein at the end of the Gulf War.


"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."