Uncanny prediction

Rick Perlstein's picture

Big Con pop quiz. Which prescient foreign policy sage answered thus, when asked if the current president's father should have gone on to Baghdad in the first Iraq War:

No. Because if we had gone into Baghdad we would have been all alone, there wouldn't have been anyone there with us, it would have been a U.S. occupation of Iraq...

Once you got to Iraq, once you came in and took it over and took down Saddam Hussein's government what are you going to put in its place? That's a very volatile part of the world.... It's a quagmire...

The other thing is casualties. Everyone was impressed that we were able to do our job with as few casualties that we had. But for the 146 Americans killed in action and for their families killed in action and for the families it was not a cheap war.

And the question for the President in terms of whether we went on to Baghdad and took additional casualties in an effort to get Saddam Hussein was how many additional dead Americans was Saddam Hussein worth?

And our judgement was not very many and I think we got it right.

Answer:


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