From: John Cuccia 

On Fri, 24 Feb 2006 03:56:38 -0500, "Gary Wiltshire"
 wrote:

>On Thu, 23 Feb 2006 20:42:53 -0500, Rich Gauszka 
>wrote:
>
>>  James Baker 1996
>> ``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.''
>>
>
>Funny to see YOU quote him.

If you think that's funny you'll love this (especially the last sentence of
the 2nd paragraph):

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/gulf/oral/cheney/2.html
Cheney: I was not an enthusiast about getting US forces and going into
Iraq. We were there in the southern part of Iraq to the extent we needed to
be there to defeat his forces and to get him out of Kuwait but the idea of
going into Baghdad for example or trying to topple the regime wasn't
anything I was enthusiastic about. I felt there was a real danger here that
you would get bogged down in a long drawn out conflict, that this was a
dangerous difficult part of the world, if you recall we were all worried
about the possibility of Iraq coming apart, the Iranians restarting the
conflict that they'd had in the eight year bloody war with the Iranians and
the Iraqis over eastern Iraq. We had concerns about the Kurds in the north,
the Turks get very nervous every time we start to talk about an independent
Kurdistan.

Plus there was the notion that you were going to set yourself a new war aim
that we hadn't talked to anybody about. That you hadn't gotten Congress to
approve, hadn't talked to the American people about. You're going to find
yourself in a situation where you've redefined your war aims and now set up
a new war aim that in effect would detract from the enormous success you
just had. What we set out to do was to liberate Kuwait and to destroy his
offensive capability, that's what I said repeatedly in my public
statements. That was the mission I was given by the President. That's what
we did. Now you can say well you should have gone to Baghdad and gotten
Saddam, I don't think so I think if we had done that we would have been
bogged down there for a very long period of time with the real possibility
we might not have succeeded.

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