Dick Cheney's speech to the Discovery Institute in 1992

[NV1962]

If you've read Susan Stranahan's article in the Campaign Desk, or read the "originating" column of Joel Connely in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, you may have come across the immense find of a speech by (then) Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney in 1992, where he brushed off the idea of going into Iraq and removing Saddam Hussein, pretty much as 'not worth the trouble.'

Here's the pertinent bit of that speech, contained in a Q&A session after his 'formal' speech:

Question: Would you address the many lives of Saddam Hussein? We were — the American public was kind of led to believe he’d be out of the picture by now, and he’s still causing trouble. How do you view all that?

SEC. CHENEY: Well, the question often comes up about Saddam. My own personal view continues to be one that he is not likely to survive as the leader of Iraq. I emphasize that’s a personal view. You can get all kinds of opinions. That’s based on the fact that he’s got a shrinking political base inside Iraq. He doesn’t control the northern part of his country. He doesn’t control the southern part of his country. His economy is a shambles. The UN sanctions continue to place great pressure on him. We’ve had these reports of an attempted coup at the end of June, early July, against him. I think he — I think his days are numbered. But that’s, again, my personal view.

The question that is usually asked is why didn’t we go on to Baghdad and get rid of him? And let me take just a moment and address that if I can, because it is an important issue. Now, as you think about watching him operate over there every day, it’s tempting to think it would be nice if he weren’t there, and clearly we’d prefer to have somebody else in power in Baghdad. But we made the decision not to go on to Baghdad because that was never part of our objective. It wasn’t what the country signed up for, it wasn’t what the Congress signed up for, it wasn’t what the coalition was put together to do. We stopped our military operations when we’d achieved our objective — when we’d liberated Kuwait and we’d destroyed most of his offensive capability — his capacity to threaten his neighbors. And no matter what he may say today, he knows full well that he lost two-thirds of his army, about half of his air force, most of his weapons of mass destruction, a lot of his productive capability. His military forces were decimated, and while he can try to regroup and reorganize now, he does not at present constitute a threat to his neighbors.

If we’d gone on to Baghdad, we would have wanted to send a lot of force. One of the lessons we learned was don’t do anything in a half-hearted fashion. When we committed the forces to Kuwait, we sent a lot of force to make certain they could do the job. We would have moved from fighting in a desert environment, where you had clear areas where we knew who the enemy was. Everybody there was, in fact, an adversary — military, and there was no intermingling of any significant civilian population. If you go into the streets of Baghdad, that changes dramatically. 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. You probably would have had to run him to ground; I don’t think he would have surrendered and gone quietly to the slammer. 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.

Now what kind of government are you going to establish? Is it going to be a Kurdish government, or a Shi’ia government, or a Suni government, or maybe a government based on the old Ba’athist Party, or some mixture thereof? You will have, I think by that time, lost the support of the Arab coalition that was so crucial to our operations over there because none of them signed on for the United States to go occupy Iraq. 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 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 very 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 put a copy of the text of the whole speech here.

Another interesting bit is where he expresses his views on the raging conflict within former Yugoslavia...