1994: Cheney Says US Occupation of Bagdad Would Have Led to ‘Quagmire’

In a television interview, former Defense Secretary Dick Cheney explains why the US did not push on to Baghdad during the 1991 Gulf War: “If we’d gone to Baghdad we would’ve been all alone, there wouldn’t have been anyone else with us, it would’ve been a US occupation of Iraq. None of the Arab forces that were willing to fight with us in Kuwait were willing to invade Iraq. Once you… 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.… The other thing is casualties. Everyone was impressed that we were able to do our job with as few casualties as we had. But for the 146 Americans killed in action and for their families it wasn’t a cheap war. The question for the president in terms of whether we went on to Baghdad… was how many additional dead Americans is Saddam worth? In our judgment, it was not very many and I think we got it right.” [Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, 8/26/2007]