Bush #1 was right?

As everybody knows, at the conclusion of the first Gulf War the first Bush Administration chose not to depose Saddam Hussein. In his book, A World Transformed, George H.W. Bush explained,

We should not march into Baghdad. To occupy Iraq would instantly shatter our coalition, turning the whole Arab world against us and make a broken tyrant into a latter-day Arab hero. Assigning young soldiers to a fruitless hunt for a securely entrenched dictator and condemning them to fight in what would be an unwinnable urban guerilla war, it could only plunge that part of the world into ever greater instability.

In his 1993 autobiography, General "Stormin' Norman" Schwarzkopf took a more practical view:

From the brief time that we did spend occupying Iraqi territory after the war, I am certain that had we taken all of Iraq, we would have been like the dinosaur in the tar pit - we would still be there, and we, not the United Nations, would be bearing the costs of the occupation. This is a burden I am sure the beleaguered American taxpayer would not have been happy to take on.

Responding to a typically self-serving editorial by David Brooks, Matthew Yglesias provides an interesting commentary on the pro-war factions:

Neither the policies being advocated by Bush nor the policies being advocated by the anti-war movement (even at its most mainstream) were the correct ones. What I wanted to see happen wasn't going to happen. I had to throw in with one side or another. I threw in with the wrong side. The bad consequences of the bad policy I got behind are significantly worse than the consequences of the bad policy advocated by the other side would have been. I blame, frankly, vanity. "Bush is right to say we should invade Iraq, but he's going about it the wrong way, here is my nuanced wonderfullness" sounds much more intelligent than some kind of chant at an anti-war rally. In fact, however, it was less intelligent. I got off the bandwagon right before the shooting started, but by then it was far too late -- this was more a case of CYA than a case of efficacious political dissent.

I don't know if Yglesias is correct, or that "useful idiots" like Brooks could ever have come to realize that Bush I had a point. I still think that the war was going to happen - Bush II wanted it that badly - and if anything his reaction to an 11th hour shift in popular opinion would have been to start the war sooner, before public resistance became too powerful for Congress to ignore.

I have argued since the war started that, while historical lessons should be learned from the manner in which we were drawn into the war, we need to recognize the reality: We're in Iraq, and we have to figure out how to best resolve our occupation. It seems that, despite our having been the occupying power for more than a year, the Bush Administration has given this almost no serious thought. They still seem to think that everything is going to get better, perhaps by magic. If a magical solution does not somehow materialize, and commentators like Brooks continue to cheerlead instead of pressing for material improvements in the Bush Administration's strategies, in twenty years it seems far more likely that history will support the position now taken by Yglesias, not Brooks. And that would be tragic.

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