Cheney on Iraq: "It's a Quagmire!" (Not)

Considering Vice President Cheney's current campaign to use military force against Iran if necessary (to stop Tehran's nuclear program), a topic of some of my recent blogs, I for one would love to hear him explain in more detail why he pushed the U.S. to invade Iraq in 2003.

In spite of being a principal architect of the Bush administration's "pre-emption" foreign policy, he's said remarkably little--whether in speeches or press interviews--about his strategic thinking in the Middle East. But this is an especially intriguing question now, considering the 1994 Cheney interview that has resurfaced on YouTube in which he opposed toppling Saddam Hussein on the grounds that it would result in a military quagmire.

In speaking about why the first Bush administration did not overthrow Saddam after ejecting Iraqi forces from Kuwait in the first Gulf War in 1991, Cheney perfectly articulated the concerns that critics of Gulf War II have long been making:

"If we had gone to Baghdad, we would have been all alone. It would have been a U.S. occupation of Iraq."

"Once you got to Iraq and took it over, took down Saddam Hussein's government, then what are you going to put in its place?"

"That's a very volatile part of the world, and if you take down the central government of Iraq, you can easily end up seeing pieces of Iraq fly off."

"It's a quagmire if you go that far and try to take over Iraq."

"The other thing was casualties. The question for the president, in terms of whether or not we went on to Baghdad, took additional casualties in an effort to get Saddam Hussein, was how many additional dead Americans is Saddam worth? Our judgment was, not very many, and I think we got it right."

Did Cheney change his mind because of 9/11? Did he believe that Saddam was connected to Bin Laden's attacks? Had Cheney come to the conclusion that the only way to spread democracy in the Arab world was to take down its worst dictator? Might Cheney's position as former head of Halliburton have influenced his perspectives? Was it plain incompetence?

In voicing concerns about toppling Saddam, Cheney was not alone back in 1994. Former President Bush, his National Security Advisor Brent Scowcroft, military commender Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf and Secretary of State James Baker each addressed the question in their memoirs and none was in any doubt that going after Saddam and re-inventing Iraq was at best a fool's errand and at worst a military and diplomatic disaster.

In their joint memoir, Bush-Scowcroft tell of their disappointment that Saddam did not collapse "as we had come to expect." They say that "for very practical reasons" the U.S. did not support the Kurd and Shiite uprisings: the danger of Iraq's breakup into sectarian zones, and a dangerous change in the balance of power in the strategically vital, oil-rich Gulf. Trying to eliminate Saddam, they wrote, "would have incurred incalculable human and political costs." Furthermore, Bush Sr. and his national security advisor say: "APPREHENDING HIM WAS PROBABLY IMPOSSIBLE...WE WOULD HAVE BEEN FORCED TO OCCUPY BAGHDAD AND, IN EFFECT, RULE IRAQ."

They added: "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." Finally, Bush-Scowcroft worried about the lack of an international mandate and having the Europe-Arab coalition disintegrate. "Unilaterally exceeding the U.N. mandate would have destroyed the precedent of international response to aggression that we hoped to establish."

In his book, Baker headlined his comment on the issue: The Marching to Baghdad Canard. Referring to the post-war controversy on the subject, Baker writes, "this idea is as nonsensical now as it was then, and NOT MERELY for the narrow legalistic reason that the UN resolutions did not authorize [it]." Among the reasons the administration felt marching on Baghdad was a "ridiculous" idea, Baker says, is that it would have made a nationalist hero out of Saddam. "Even if Saddam were captured and his regime toppled, American forces would still be confronted with the spectre of a military occupation of indefinite duration to pacify the country and sustain a new government in power. The ensuing urban warfare would surely result in more casualties to American GIs than the war itself, thus creating a political firestorm at home, criticism from many of our allies and dissolution of the coalition." Baker echoes the concern, too, that the breakup of Iraq would leave a dangerous and unpredictable Iran as the undisputed regional power in the Gulf.

Schwarzkopf, too, ridiculed the idea of pushing further to bring down Saddam. "I am certain that had we taken all of Iraq, we would have been like the dinosaur in the tar pit--we would still be there, and we, not the UN, would be bearing the costs of that occupation. This is a burden I am sure the beleaguered American taxpayer would not have been happy to take on."

Did the "Wise Men" change their minds, as Cheney did? Scowcroft, for one, wrote a powerful editorial in the Wall Street Journal opposing Bush-Cheney's plans to invade Iraq. Published Aug. 15, 2002 just as the Iraq debate heated up in the U.S., it was entitled unequivocally, "Don't Attack Saddam." Some of Scowcroft's concerns turned out to be overdone--a possible Iraq-Israel WMD volley--but his warning nonetheless holds up. He worried that the invasion would increase Muslim rage against the U.S., swell the ranks of terrorist groups, threaten regional stability, damage America's international alliances, hurt the U.S. and global economies and increase Middle East bloodshed.

"If we are to achieve our strategic objectives in Iraq, a military campaign very likely would have to be followed by a large-scale, long-term military occupation," he wrote. "If we reject a comprehensive perspective, we put at risk our campaign against terrorism as well as stability and security in a vital region of the world."

--By Scott MacLeod