re: #565 lostlakehiker

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.

Nevertheless, the choice to finish the job was on the table, and was considered seriously, only to be vetoed at the last possible minute. Which means the possibility of making the choice was factored in from the beginning.

The whining would have stopped eventually, and there is the precedent of “hot pursuit”. I think most of the coalition would have been secretly glad had we taken Saddam out in ‘91. As for the UN? Fuck ‘em then and triple-fuck ‘em today.