re: #384 Cato the Elder

I said at the end of Gulf War I, and I still believe today, that our biggest mistake collectively, as a nation fighting a just war (or at least one that was plainly in the interests of Empire), was not taking out Saddam in 1991, when we had the means, the opportunity, the motive, and a clear shot. Instead, Bush I caved to wusses in the administration, the U-fucking-N, and his own pusillanimous instincts. Instead of going to Berlin to finish the job, to make an analogy, we stopped at the French border and told the Germans to rise up and overthrow the dictator. We told the Kurds in the north and the Marsh Arabs in the south that we’d have their back, and left them to die by the thousands.

There is a sense in which one can see Gulf War II as a belated balancing of the books.

People say “b-b-b-but the UN would have disapproved, and we would have lost coalition support”, and I say, big fucking deal. It’s easier to ask forgiveness than to beg for permission.

When you as a nation swear to God that you will stop with the liberation of Kuwait, when you promise everybody who has lent their soil to your forces so you may prosecute that war and no other, you need a very good reason to break that oath.

You will have no chance getting anyone to believe that the next oath you make is sincere, if you casually toss the last one aside, deeming it a “scrap of paper”. And you never know when you will need to be believed. Credibility is beyond price.

The mistake, if there was one, was in making that solemn promise in the first place. Suppose we had said privately to the Saudis that this boil needs to be lanced, and if you allow us the use of your territory to do the job, we will do it, all of it? Who can tell now what the Saudis would have answered to that? An ambiguous public statement of purpose could have been made for window dressing and to confuse Saddam’s generals.