ABC/Disney no help on this Dick

Please give a thought to the needs of US Vice President Cheney as he attempts an ill fated diplomatic rescue mission today in Saudi Arabia. On his last visit King Abdullah told him and has continued to tell any State Department and Pentagon officials who pass through, over the last six weeks that the Saudi Kingdom no longer supports Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki and does not believe the new U.S. military strategy to secure Baghdad will work .. let's just hope that Abdullah doesn't pull these quotes out of the dusty files ....

Patrick Tyler - New York Times story April 13, 1991, (less than one month after the shooting of fish in a barrel stopped in the Gulf war )

"Defense Secretary Dick Cheney defends the decision to end the war. "If you're going to go in and try to topple Saddam Hussein," Cheney said, "you have to go to
Baghdad. Once you've got Baghdad, it's not clear what you do with it. It's not clear
what kind of government you would put in place of the one that's currently there now.

Is it going to be a Shia regime, a Sunni regime or a Kurdish regime? Or one that tilts toward the Baathists, or one that tilts toward the Islamic fundamentalists? How much credibility is that government going to have if it's set up by the United States military when it's there? How long does the United States military have to stay to protect the people that sign on for that government, and what happens to it once we leave?"

5 years later in a Gulf War documentary produced for PBS's Frontline and aired on January 9, 1996.. Describing the decision to end the war on Feb. 27, 1991—Cheney said:

" ..... Now you can say, well, you should have gone to Baghdad and gotten Saddam. I don't think so. I think if we had done that we would have been bogged down there for a very long period of time with the real possibility we might not have succeeded."

Or as someone wrote on the eve of the illegal invasion ..

I've taken Baghdad what do I do now?

What is uncertain is the aftermath. This is the variable never publicly factored into the thinking(?) of the Tony Sopranos of Dubya's gang; their deeds plant the seeds of future, furious, frightening resistance. As many as half a million Iraqi soldiers may be intentionally killed and perhaps 100,000 civilians written off to collateral damage.

Think of the grief of millions after this slaughter, the conversion of that grief into rage, combine that with the internecine struggles based on historical ethnic fault lines (that the Ba'ath Party has repressed), and we begin to appreciate the explosive complexity of post-invasion Iraq. This invasion will also ignite the well financed fires of Arab and Muslim (of all shades, hues and fealties) humiliation and anger. Either in the sands of the desert or on city streets, far from this war, the body bags will build up.