The Report
of the Iraq Inquiry
40.
The coalition
had made a deliberate decision in 1991 not to pursue the overthrow
of
Saddam
Hussein. Mr Baker stated in April 1991 that “the removal of
Saddam Hussein
was neither
a political nor a military objective” of the US, and
that:
“We are not
prepared to go down the slippery slope of being sucked into a civil
war
… We cannot
police what goes on inside Iraq, and we cannot be the arbiters
of
who governs
Iraq. As President [George HW] Bush has repeatedly made clear,
our
objective
was the liberation of Kuwait. It never extended to the remaking of
Iraq.
We repeatedly
said that could only be done by the Iraqi people.”10
41.
In a later
interview, Mr Dick Cheney, the US Defense Secretary in 1991,
said that
there had
been concern about what to do with Iraqi soldiers who were
“surrendering in
droves”;
and that there was a limit to how long you could “continue the
bloodshed without
having it
look as though we were asking our troops to do something we
probably shouldn’t
ask them to
do”.11
He added
that, while some had argued that the coalition should
have
continued
to Baghdad, he thought that if they had done that “we would have
been bogged
down there
for a very long time with the real possibility we might not have
succeeded”.
42.
From the end
of the conflict, the objective of encouraging a change of regime
in
Baghdad was
an element of the policy debate in Washington. Mr Richard
Haass, who
served in
the administration of each President Bush, observed that the
administrations
of
President George HW Bush, President Bill Clinton and President
George W Bush
“each
contended with the question of how to balance containment with a
desire for
43.
Saddam Hussein
proved more intractable than was predicted. Throughout the
1990s
the UN
Security Council frequently discussed Iraq and Saddam’s continued
refusal
to accept
all the obligations imposed. A total of 41 resolutions were passed
between
resolution
687and December 2000. There were continuous efforts to contain the
Iraqi
threat and
put pressure on Iraq to disarm and to comply with the Security
Council’s
requirements.
Saddam Hussein’s objective was to break out from UN restrictions
and,
by avoiding
full compliance, to retain and rebuild Iraq’s military
capabilities.
44.
In addition to
diplomatic isolation, the strategy of “containment” had
several
dimensions
which developed in response to challenges posed by the Iraqi
regime,
including:
•
NFZs
covering the North and South of Iraq, patrolled by US, UK
and
(until
1996) French aircraft;
•
economic
sanctions;
10
Statements
by James A Baker III reported in Los Angeles
Times,
8 April 1991.
11 Transcript
Frontline,
‘Oral History: Richard Cheney’.
12
Haass
RN. War of
Necessity War of Choice: A Memoir of two Iraqi Wars. Simon
& Schuster, 2009.
32