Military Reporter Recalls Bush's Objections To Iraq Invasion On A Previous Veteran's Day

By: Joe Strupp Sig Christenson, a founding member of Military Reporters and Editors who has worked five assignments in Iraq since the war began, reached back some 10 years for a Veteran's Day piece that noted President George Bush's early opposition to an Iraq invasion.

Christenson, who covers the military for the San Antonio (Tex.) Express-News, penned the piece for Sunday's paper that cited Bush's comments on Veteran's Day 1997 as governor of Texas. He pointed to Bush's defense of his father's decision during the Gulf War not to remove Saddam Hussein.

"There are a lot of Americans (who say), 'Why didn't you go get him?'" Bush told the Express-News back in 1997, according to Christenson. "Well, I'm confident that losing men and women as a result of sniper fire inside of Baghdad would have turned the tide of public opinion very quickly," Bush added.

Bush said efforts to ferret out Saddam from his many Baghdad hideouts would have transformed the battle from a desert conflict to an unpopular "guerrilla war," Chistenson recalled.

He added: "Neither Bush nor his son expressed regret in the 1997 interviews over the failure of U.S. forces to pursue and destroy the Iraqi army's Republican Guard."

Christenson observed: "That Veterans Day, Bush said efforts to ferret out Saddam from his many Baghdad hideouts would have transformed the battle from a desert conflict to an unpopular 'guerrilla war.' A decade later, proponents of the Iraq war, including President Bush and his father, dismiss those reservations, saying the 9-11 terrorist attacks forced the conflict."

Christenson added that White House spokesman Blair Jones told him Friday: "Since that time this nation experienced one of the most horrific moments in our history ? the attacks on September 11, 2001. As the president has said many times, one of the lessons learned from that day is that we have to take emerging threats seriously. We have to deal with them before they fully materialize."

But Christenson then pointed out, "the fears expressed 10 years ago have become reality. The United States is mired in a ground war, with no military or political solutions in near sight. Insurgents, using increasingly sophisticated roadside bombs to target coalition troops, are waging the very guerrilla war that Bush predicted."

"A crowd of several thousand had largely emptied the cemetery after the governor delivered the Veterans Day keynote speech on that cloudy, cool morning when Bush broke away from a media gaggle and chatted with the Express-News about Iraq. The governor praised his father's decision to abruptly end the offensive, launched to drive the Iraqi army out of Kuwait."

Christenson notes, "Both men have consistently supported one another on how they handled their conflicts in the Persian Gulf. Back then, the elder Bush told the Express-News his son 'got it right' in his assessment of the first Gulf War. The former president also suggested that the decision he did not make ? to send U.S. troops all the way into Baghdad ? would have led America into another Vietnam-like conflict, 'and one guerrilla war in my lifetime was enough.'"

"That day he said taking the war to Iraq's capital would have been a form of 'mission creep' that would have exceeded his mandate to prosecute the war and unraveled the 31-nation Persian Gulf coalition," Christenson recalls of the elder Bush's 1997 views. "Such a decision, added Bush, who served from 1989 to 1993, 'would have made a (Gamal Abdel) Nasser' out of Saddam ? a reference to the late Egyptian leader who remains a hero in the Arab world."

Christenson goes on to say, "The comments of both men a decade ago stand in contrast to statements they made at the end of last week. President Bush said at a Terrell Hills fund-raiser Thursday that history would vindicate his decision. 'Some day people are going to look back at this time and day and say, 'Thank God there was a generation that did not lose faith ... because the Middle East is a place free of suiciders,' he told supporters attending the private event for Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, after visiting with wounded GIs at Fort Sam."

Later, Christenson points out that "Vice President Dick Cheney, in an April 15, 1994, interview...said Arab troops would have abandoned the coalition if the Americans had pressed on. U.S. forces would have stood alone in an occupation of Baghdad, he said, and seen greater casualties. '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 of Iraq you can easily end up seeing pieces of Iraq fly off,' Cheney said in the interview, which was done by C-SPAN and surfaced last summer on YouTube. He added, 'It's a quagmire if you go that far and try to take over Iraq.'"

The entire story is available here
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