Les Aspin Quotes
We should have done more damage to the Iraqi forces before they withdrew from the Kuwaiti theater.
Aspin, Les. Interview. Face the Nation, CBS, 7 Apr. 1991.
After defeating the Iraqi Army in the field, bush allowed them to keep their arms, did not take Baghdad, and removed the allied troops. Saddam Hussein then attacked his own dissidents and murdered them with the helicopters that we let him keep and stayed in power. Bush’s son, two decades later, then started the 2nd Iraq war and deposed Saddam.
A little over a decade later, it was the conservative President who was condemning Saddam Hussein for gassing his own people and justified the Iraq War in part over that. And in 2007 Saddam having been toppled from power, he was tried for this crimes against humanity with the major charge being his gassing of the Iraqi Kurds. He was hanged for the “liberal hate speech” which had turned into conservative hate speech, but was a correct accusation regardless of which political pole was making it. There were few issues where most Americans were as unanimous as Saddam’s guilt in the gassing of the Kurds with Limbaugh and Saddam’s relatives being about the only people who saw it as propaganda.
His balanced judgment and concern for American Casualties changed during the Iraq War over a decade later where he insisted on taking steady American casualties even after Saddam had been deposed and American troops were in the middle of a sectarian civil war.
In 1991 Bush’s father, and his military and security advisors, after winning an overwhelming victory and accomplishing the war aims stated of rolling back the Iraqi aggression, decided that it was not worth the loss of American and Iraqi lives to try and occupy Bagdad and change the regime. America and its large coalition withdrew in victory having restored the pre-aggression status quo. The son and some of the right wing and neo conservatives always saw that strategy as a mistake and this quotation is often cited as showing this psychological animus to that decision of his father. His use of the term “cut and run” which implies defeat and some lack of courage is surprising to some as America and the coalition did anything but run as they had killed and destroyed far more or the Iraqi military power than the son’s later war did. It was a withdrawal and there were critics at the time, but no one accused the elder Bush of “cut and run” except that is the way the son obviously saw it.
Leslie Aspin Jr. was an American politician who served as the U.S. Representative for Wisconsin's 1st congressional district from 1971 to 1993 and as the 18th United States Secretary of Defense under President Bill Clinton from 1993 to 1994.
