In August, 1992, then Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney answered questions after giving a speech at the Discovery Institute in Seattle. Operation Desert Storm had been over for 18 months, and the troops were pretty much home. 146 Americans had been killed, and Kuwait and its oil had been liberated.
From the Seattle Post-Intelligencer:
"And the question in my mind is how many additional American casualties is Saddam worth?" Cheney said then in response to a question.
"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."
... Going to Baghdad, Cheney said in 1992, would require a much different approach militarily than fighting in the open desert outside the capital, a type of warfare that U.S. troops were not familiar, or comfortable fighting.
2007-08-28
06:09:36
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