[quote]Tiribulus wrote:
Zap Branigan wrote:
GDollars37 wrote:
Zap Branigan wrote:
Tiribulus wrote:
Mick28 wrote:
Tiribulus wrote:
Powell showed his true colors.
One color and it’s BLACK.
I don’t think that’s IT. Powell is a liberal. Now we know for sure though I never had much faith in him to begin with. He advocated the first gulf war (sheepishly), but had no problem with relinquishing command to the UN and agreed with the resolution (or non resolution) not to eliminate Hussein when we had him in our cross hairs and could have saved us and the world all this bullshit were in the middle of now.
Yup. He fucked up GW1. I never liked the guy.
Do either of you guys know anything about Desert Storm, the first Bush Administration, or reality? Everyone, Bush, Scowcroft, Cheney and Powell, was against driving on to Baghdad and deposing Saddam. The obvious benefit to Iran was feared, as was the chaos that would result, and the burden we would bear. Sound familiar? Cheney in 1992:
“I would guess if we had gone in there, I would still have forces in Baghdad today. We’d be running the country. We would not have been able to get everybody out and bring everybody home. And the final point that I think needs to be made is this question of casualties. I don’t think you could have done all of that without significant additional U.S. casualties, and while everybody was tremendously impressed with the low cost of the (1991) conflict, for the 146 Americans who were killed in action and for their families, it wasn’t a cheap war. And the question in my mind is, how many additional American casualties is Saddam (Hussein) worth? And the answer is, not that 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.”
I thought this was common knowledge. Those guys got it right the first time.
Bullshit, they should have taken care of it when they had support from the Arab world. Powell was integral to the decision.
And, AND the reason Bush gave and the biggest campaign cry of Phil Graham a few years later was that the UN resolutions which they were bound to by accepting their command forbade us from killing or even capturing Hussein.
Schwarzkopf flat out stated (I still have that tape somewhere) that they knew where he was and Bush told him to stand down because the UN resolutions did not allow us to harm Saddam Hussein. They cooked up the whole power vacuum argument to explain why they left him alone because he was an instant boil on the world’s ass the second we left and it looked weak to remind us that they had allowed the useless UN to drag us out of there by the nuts.
It sounded better to make it look like our idea. During the 96 campaign Graham was screaming that if elected he would never again send our troops into a conflict under any, but U.S. command. He cited Hussein’s unforgivable survival as the an example of what happens when you do.
Powell was a party to the “we still need him there” routine. This is a perfect example of what happens when you do not crush an enemy when he’s on the ropes. You have to go back and this time it’s 100 times bloodier and more expensive.[/quote]
What? This is one of the weirder conspiracy theories I have heard in a while. Our troops were under U.S. command, as they have always been, a UN mandate does not change who is in command. And if you know anything about Bush Sr.'s realist foreign policy thinking, you would realize that removing Saddam was not something he and his Administration wanted, certainly not if it was U.S. troops charging into Baghdad. Go look up anything Brent Scowcroft has ever said or written. As for Phil Gramm…he’s Phil Gramm. Come on.