Unheeded Advice on Saddam by Ralph R. Reiland

"How many additional American lives is Saddam Hussein worth? The answer I would give is not very damn many."

That was the answer from Dick Cheney during a May 1992 briefing, explaining why the first President Bush was right when he decided not to push forward to Baghdad to get rid of Saddam after American forces had trounced the Iraqi army in Kuwait in March 1991.

At the time of that briefing, Cheney was secretary of defense, fresh from his task of directing Operation Desert Storm.

In his 1998 memoir, A World Transformed" co-authored with Brent Scowcroft, his former national security adviser, the senior Bush explained why he didn't send American troops to "march into Baghdad" to bring down Saddam at the end of the Gulf War:

"To occupy Iraq would instantly shatter our coalition, turning the whole Arab world against us, and make a broken tyrant into a latter-day Arab hero. It would have taken us way beyond the imprimatur of international law bestowed by the resolutions of the Security Council, assigning young soldiers to a fruitless hunt for a securely entrenched dictator and condemning them to fight in what would be an unwinnable urban guerrilla war. It could only plunge that part of the world into even greater instability and destroy the credibility we were working so hard to re-establish."

On top of being "unwinnable," Bush warned that the costs of an occupation of Iraq would be "incalculable," with meager benefits:

"Trying to eliminate Saddam, extending the ground war into an occupation of Iraq, would have violated our guideline about not changing objectives in midstream, engaging in 'mission creep,' and would have incurred incalculable human and political costs. Apprehending him was probably impossible. We had been unable to find Noriega in Panama, which we knew intimately. We would have been forced to occupy Baghdad and, in effect, rule Iraq. The coalition would instantly have collapsed, the Arabs deserting it in anger, and other allies pulling out as well. Under those circumstances, there was no viable 'exit strategy' we could see, violating another of our principles. Furthermore, we had been self-consciously trying to set a pattern for handling aggression in the post-Cold War world. Going in and occupying Iraq, thus unilaterally exceeding the United Nations' mandate, would have destroyed the precedent of international response to aggression that we hoped to establish. Had we gone the invasion route, the United States could conceivably still be an occupying power in a bitterly hostile land."

That was 1998, and not everyone agreed. A group of Washington heavyweights, including Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, Bill Kristol and Dick Cheney, formed The Project for the New American Century in spring 1997, with an early focus on ousting Saddam Hussein – by force, if necessary.

On Jan. 26, 1998, the group wrote to President Bill Clinton, urging him to adopt a strategy that would "aim, above all, at the removal of Saddam Hussein's regime from power." Arguing that we didn't have the "ability to ensure that Saddam Hussein is not producing weapons of mass destruction," they asked Clinton to adopt "a willingness to undertake military action, as diplomacy is clearly failing."

Writing to Rep. Newt Gingrich and Sen. Trent Lott in May 1998, the group argued that the United States should be prepared to use military force "to protect our vital interests in the Gulf – and, if necessary, to help remove Saddam from power."

All that war hype, of course, was years before Sept. 11, years before Dick Cheney claimed that Iraq was "the geographic base of the terrorists who have had us under assault for many years," long before Condoleezza Rice was seeing mushroom clouds over Chicago.

On Sept. 11, according to a report from National Security correspondent David Martin at CBS, it took barely five hours after American Airlines Flight 77 hit the Pentagon for Defense Secretary Rumsfeld to tell his aides to come up with plans for striking Iraq – even though there was no evidence connecting Saddam to the attack.

Notes taken by the Pentagon aides, at 2:40 p.m. on Sept. 11, quote Rumsfeld as saying he wanted "best info fast. Judge whether good enough hit S.H," meaning Saddam Hussein. "Go massive," the notes quote Rumsfeld as saying. "Sweep it all up. Things related and not."

And so, as they say, the rest is history, produced and directed by the guys in the White House from the Project for the New American Century, with no reports of the son getting any briefings about what his father had warned against.

Ralph R. Reiland is a Pittsburgh Tribune-Review columnist and the B. Kenneth Simon Professor of Free Enterprise at Robert Morris University.