What would the world be, once bereft of wet and wildness?
Let them be left, O let them be left, wildness and wet;
Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet.
-- Gerard Manley Hopkins
Thursday, November 06, 2003
Oh
I just got this email from Ali. Anyone out there who's read Bush Sr.'s memoirs (I know all of you have) care to corroborate this?
"In his memoirs, "A World Transformed," written five years ago, George Bush, Sr., wrote the following to explain why he didn't go after Saddam Hussein at the end of the Gulf War:
'Trying to eliminate Saddam...would have incurred incalculable human and political costs. Apprehending him was probably impossible.... We would have been forced to occupy Baghdad and, in effect, rule Iraq.... There was no viable "exit strategy" we could see, violating another of our principles. Furthermore, we had been consciously trying to set a pattern for handling aggression in the post-Cold War world. Going in and occupying Iraq, thus unilaterally exceeding the United Nations' mandate, would have destroyed the precedent of International response to aggression that we hoped to establish. Had we gone the invasion route, the United States could conceivably still be an occupying power in a bitterly hostile land.'"