Dick Cheney on why the US shouldn’t invade Iraq (1994):C-Span: “1994 Clip of a C-SPAN Interview with Dick Cheney”“Because if we had gone to Baghdad we would have been all alone. There wouldn’t have been anybody else with us. It would have been a U.S. occupation of Iraq. None of the Arab forces that were willing to fight with us in Kuwait were willing to invade Iraq. Once you got to Iraq and took it over and 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 in Iraq, you could easily end up seeing pieces of Iraq fly off. Part of it the Syrians would like to have, the west. Part of eastern Iraq the Iranians would like to claim. Fought over for eight years. In the north, you’ve got the Kurds. And if the Kurds spin loose and join with Kurds in Turkey, then you threaten the territorial integrity of Turkey. It’s a quagmire if you go that far and try to take over Iraq.”
Informed Consent
“If you take down the central gov’t…you could… see… pieces of Iraq fly off”- Dick Cheney 1994
2 comments:
If regional stability is a long term goal in Iraq, It might be a better outcome to allow Iraq to revert to more natural tribal/sectarian borders and undergo a short period of instability. The lines and borders that exist require humans to act inhuman, to embrace their adversaries and bring them into tribe which is a sort of inclusion that should be an evolutionary taboo for any species. The US can't even have Mexican people entering the country to compete, imagine having to share a political system with your absolute adversaries that come from cultures that have been adversaries for thousands of years.
Newer ideas of universal respect and cooperation make sense but at what price?
Upon the demise of the Ottoman Empire, Britain arbitrarily redrew borders artificially creating nation states on the European model without regard to the historical and cultural makeup of the region. The world has been paying the price of this folly since then.
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