A MAN WITH A MEMORY LOOKS AT THE GULF WAR | 2001-11-10
No one has more contempt for the cowardice of Republican spokesmen than I have.
But because conservatives are abject cowards when they face actual liberals, I have often been reduced to what I have to do now: defending the Republicans I despise from obvious leftist hypocrisy. As usual I will do this by making a statement of simple facts that no cowardly respectable conservative would dare make.
Today every Democrat attacks Republicans by asking "Why didn't we take out Saddam Hussein when we had the chance?" They mean why didn't Bush's father, President GHW Bush, fail to go on to Baghdad and remove Saddam Hussein after we had won the Gulf War in 1991.
In 1991, American forces had driven the Iraqi army out of Kuwait and could have destroyed Saddam Hussein's remaining armed forces without much effort. So why didn't Bush Senior "take out Saddam Hussein?"
As the only man in America who has a memory I will tell you a big reason Bush Senior didn't "take out Hussein" in 1991. That reason was the Democrats who are doing all the shouting now.
I am the only American who remembers the weeks before the Gulf War began in 1991. Only I remember that back then the national press had one main topic, like the terrorist attacks are the only main topic now. That topic was, "Should America go to war with Iraq, or should it give nonviolent sanctions more time to work?"
At that time, the then-President GHW Bush said he would go into Iraq with or without congressional approval. But the great debate went on in congress anyway.
Republicans put in a bill to support President Bush's taking military action. The Democratic leadership was solidly against it, Republicans and moderate Democrats were solidly for it. The debate was dramatic and all over the media in the weeks before the Gulf War began.
Guess what the main point that the Democratic opposition made against going into battle against Iraq was? Guess what was the one point they hammered on day after day, headline after headline, with the entire nation watching and talking about it?
Their one big argument was that, if they gave him the power, Bush would not just throw the Iraqis out of occupied Kuwait. They said that Bush would use those powers to go to Baghdad and overthrow Saddam Hussein.
Republicans promised, day in and day out, that they would not under any circumstances use the power congressional sanction would give them to "take out" Saddam Hussein. President GHW Bush assured the Democrats that he had no intention of "taking out" Saddam Hussein.
A quarter of a billion Americans heard that debate in the media and everywhere else, and not one of them remembers a word of it except me.
But today when Democrat after Democrat demands to know why Bush's father didn't "take out" Saddam Hussein the fact that they were fanatically opposed to the idea in 1991 has not been mentioned by a single respectable conservative spokesman.
It still hasn't.