Truth - Al Franken [90]
Rumsfeld was right. In the years afterward, the Reagan and H. W. Bush administrations authorized the sale to Iraq of precursors to chemical and biological weapons, including anthrax and bubonic plague, as well as conventional weapons such as Chilean cluster bombs. (At the same time, of course, Reagan was selling thousands of rockets to Iran. That sounds bad, until you consider that he needed to sell those arms to Iran in order to illegally fund the Contras in Nicaragua. So don’t be so quick to judge.)
The 1988 gassing of thousands of the aforementioned Kurds hardly dimmed the enthusiasm of the two Republican administrations. In fact, U.S. military intelligence actually expanded its contributions to the Butcher of Baghdad after the gas attack. But all of that came to an abrupt end when Wolfowitz’s prophecy came to fruition. On August 2, 1990, Iraq invaded Kuwait. That put Saddam Hussein in control of 20 percent of the world’s crude oil reserves. The love affair between the Republican right and the Baathist ultraright was as over as Brad and Jen.2
President Bush, father of President Bush and Governor Bush and son of Senator Bush, assembled a mighty coalition to push back the aggressor and reclaim Kuwait’s oil for America and its allies. In almost all regards, the war was a huge success. As the remnants of Saddam’s Republican Guard retreated, George H. W. Bush decided to keep his word to his allies in the coalition not to march to Baghdad.
Bush explained his reasoning in a 1999 speech to veterans of the first Gulf War:
Whose life would be on my hands as the commander in chief because I, unilaterally, went beyond the international law, went beyond the stated mission, and said we’re going to show our macho? “We’re going into Baghdad. We’re going to be an occupying power—America in an Arab land—with no allies at our side.” It would have been disastrous.
Paul Wolfowitz understood his point. As Wolfowitz wrote in an essay published in 1997:
A new regime would have become the United States’ responsibility. Conceivably, this could have led the United States into a more or less permanent occupation of a country that could not govern itself, but where the rule of a foreign occupier would be increasingly resented.
Bush did keep the pressure on Saddam by encouraging the Shias in the south and the Kurds in the north to rise up against the Sunni dictator. But when they did, Bush left them high and dry. And dead. You see, Saddam was still useful to the United States in order to keep Iran in check. As Colin Powell wrote in his autobiography, “Our practical intention was to leave Baghdad enough power to survive as a threat to an Iran that remained bitterly hostile to the United States.” So the Bush administration allowed the Iraqi regime to mow down hundreds of thousands of Shias and Kurds from helicopter gunships before establishing “no-fly zones” and imposing rigorous sanctions.3
The sanctions allowed U.N. inspectors to poke around and discover a surprisingly advanced nuclear weapons program. Saddam, it seems, was an even bigger Assaholah than the Ayatollah.
But at long last, he had been brought to heel. He was no longer a threat to anybody other than his own people. As much as Saddam could brutalize, rape, and lethally neglect Iraqis, he couldn’t hurt anybody else. He was like a rabid pit bull on a choke chain that extended only to the border of his squalid, blood-drenched little yard.
George W. Bush came to office determined to screw the pooch. I think I know what that means. Point is, he was psyched about overthrowing Saddam. Where did President Bush, who had no opinion at all about most foreign policy issues, acquire his enthusiasm for regime change? Same way he acquired everything. From his friends. Friends inherited from his father.
One of them was Paul Wolfowitz. While he had recognized the folly of taking Baghdad at the end of the first Gulf War, Wolfowitz had also regretted how the U.S. had abandoned the Shias and Kurds