[QUOTE="-Sun_Tzu-"] At the end of the Gulf War H.W. strongly encouraged the Iraqi people to overthrow Saddam. Not only that, but the CIA flooded Iraqi radio waves with propaganda about the dire need to overthrow Saddam. The U.S. led many, many Iraqis to believe that they would not be fighting against Saddam and his military alone. Right after the ceasefire, there were uprisings throughout Iraq against Saddam. But the rebels were caught with their pants down - they never got any international support, including from the U.S. who weeks earlier were pleading for these uprisings to occur, and Saddam, like any good genocidal dictator does, indiscriminately unleashed his wrath upon his constituents. Had the U.S. aided the rebels (who were at the beginning of the uprisings very successful), Saddam probably would've been overthrown in 1991, meaning that a decades worth of sanctions that resulted in a huge number of deaths (including about a half million children under the age of five) and a whole other war in 2003 to finally get rid of Saddam would've been avoided. The way H.W. handled Iraq after the Gulf War was simply dreadful.fidosim
Again post-Gulf War Iraq is a tragic story, but Daddy Bush's actions make strategic sense. We can hypothesize about what might have been in we had given more support to the rebels, but it's hard to find much fault with HW given what his actual goals were in Desert Storm. More aid could have overthrown Saddam, sure, but it also could also could have dragged us into a full-on regime change operation in Iraq like what we started in 2003, but at an economically difficult time in the US and an extremely fragile state of affairs internationally.
We can postulate the same way about the Bay of Pigs. If we had given air support in that case, we could have overthrown Castro, or we could have gotten into a shooting war with Cuba and become mired in a disastrous conflict during the height of the Cold War. I can't find fault with Bush or Kennedy for erring on the side of caution in these events.
How is it hard to find fault with HW? The U.S, HW specifically, was pleading for the Iraqi people to rise up against Saddam and gave the Iraqi people the impression that they would not be fighting against Saddam alone. After they did rise up (and took control of much of the country), but then Saddam indiscriminately massacred his own people in response, and the rest of the world, including HW, sat and did nothing in response (to add insult to injury, the U.S. imposes sanctions on Iraq that did nothing to weaken Saddam but did a lot to inadvertently lead to the deaths of about a half million Iraqis who were under the age of five). Yes you are right that HW didn't have any intention to remove Saddam - that wasn't one of his goals. But the world doesn't revolve around the intentions of HW - just because the removal of Saddam wasn't on his to-do list doesn't mean that he isn't at fault for sitting back and doing nothing while Iraqis are being slaughtered for an uprising that he helped incite.
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