Wednesday, June 20, 2012
Richard Cheney
I also look at that part of the world as of vital interest to the United States for the next hundred years it’s going to be the world’s supply of oil. We’ve got a lot of friends in the region. We’re always going to have to be involved there. Maybe it’s part of our national character, you know we like to have these problems nice and neatly wrapped up, put a ribbon around it. You deploy a force, you win the war and the problem goes away and it doesn’t work that way in the Middle East it never has and isn’t likely to in my lifetime.
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oral history: richard cheney
ReplyDeleteInterview with Richard Cheney, Secretary of Defense
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/gulf/oral/cheney/1.html
I never tried to penetrate a mine field, how do you do that? How do you run air control traffic pattern when you’ve to get 4,000 airplanes all trying to get over Baghdad at the same time? How does a cruise missile work? What’s a laser guided munition all about? What’s the secret of the F1 17 Stealths? Which are global positioning systems and the Abram tanks? All the other things that went into it. There was an awful lot of the operational art that as a civilian I didn’t know. And so I’d scheduled a whole series of briefings for myself with the joint staff in the run up to Desert Storm and by the time we started the operation I had great confidence that the guys would be able to do what they said they could do and I never had any doubt about the military outcome, could we achieve our objective?
ReplyDeleteThe question was, the thing no one could answer was the question of casualties and we assumed with respect to the air war that our worst night would be the first night. That you had the Iraqi forces, the air force basically full up, the air defence system in place — that we would suffer our largest number of casualties that first night of the air war. And in fact when it was all over with I spent the night in my office at the Pentagon and I got the word when all the aircraft came back we’d only lost one airplane and it was just a phenomenal result. I could not believe that we’d done that well. Obviously we’d been enormously successful and all the training and planning that had went into it had paid off.
There’s this line that people use– well, George Bush is out of power and Saddam Hussein is still there– well, we have a democracy in this country, we elect Presidents, we unelect Presidents, people serve for four years or eight years, it’s not a dictatorship. It’s not like Iraq, it’s goofy even to make a comparison. I think if Saddam wasn’t there that his successor probably wouldn’t be notably friendlier to the United States than he is. I also look at that part of the world as of vital interest to the United States for the next hundred years it’s going to be the world’s supply of oil. We’ve got a lot of friends in the region. We’re always going to have to be involved there. Maybe it’s part of our national character, you know we like to have these problems nice and neatly wrapped up, put a ribbon around it. You deploy a force, you win the war and the problem goes away and it doesn’t work that way in the Middle East it never has and isn’t likely to in my lifetime.
ReplyDeleteWe are always going to have to be involved there and Saddam is just one more irritant but there’s a long list of irritants in that part of the world and for us to have done what would have been necessary to get rid of him–certainly a very large force for a long time into Iraq to run him to ground and then you’ve got to worry about what comes after. And you then have to accept the responsibility for what happens in Iraq, accept more responsibility for what happens in the region. It would have been an all US operation, I don’t think any of our allies would have been with us, maybe Britain, but nobody else. And you’re going to take a lot more American casualties if you’re gonna go muck around in Iraq for weeks on end trying to run Saddam Hussein to ground and capture Baghdad and so forth and I don’t think it would have been worth it. I think the, the decision the President made in effect to stop when we did was the right one.