August 1992: Defense Secretary Cheney Publicly Defends Decision Not to Overthrow Hussein, Privately Disagrees

Defense Secretary Dick Cheney gives a speech to the Discovery Institute in Seattle defending the Bush administration’s decision not to enter Baghdad or overthrow Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein during the 1991 Gulf War (see January 16, 1991 and After). Cheney says that because of Hussein’s “shrinking power base” in Iraq, the fact that he does not control the northern or southern portions of his country, his all-but-destroyed national economy, and the UN sanctions, “his days are numbered” as Iraq’s dictator, so there was no need to overthrow him. “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.… All of a sudden you’ve got a battle you’re fighting in a major built-up city, a lot of civilians are around, significant limitations on our ability to use our most effective technologies and techniques.… Once we had rounded him up and gotten rid of his government, then the question is what do you put in its place? You know, you then have accepted the responsibility for governing Iraq.… 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 US casualties. And while everybody was tremendously impressed with the low cost of the 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 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.” [Seattle Post-Intelligencer, 9/29/2004; Seattle Post-Intelligencer, 9/29/2004; Dubose and Bernstein, 2006, pp. 171-172] While Cheney publicly supports Bush’s decision not to go into Baghdad, privately he had urged Bush to invade the capital and overthrow Hussein (see February 1991-1992). According to Victor Gold, a former Bush speechwriter and coauthor of a novel with Cheney’s wife Lynne, Cheney’s private stance was far more aggressive than his public pronouncements. [Unger, 2007, pp. 182]