Bush pere didn’t drink the utopian ‘democracy will convert the heathen’ koolaid and had enough sense not to try.
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That is not why he stopped at the gates, and I suspect you know that.
The Coalition did not support regime change, it was about getting Saddam back inside of his borders.
revisionist history looks no better on the right than it does on the left.
There’s nothing ‘revisionist’ in what I posted. Bush 41 surrounded himself with foreign policy realists, Brent Scowcroft being a significant example. His goal was to push Saddam back into Iraq and punish him for attacking Kuwait. And having achieved that he stopped.
Bush 41 never expressed regret that he failed to conquer Iraq. An essay he cowrote with Scowcroft mentions the danger of trying to do exactly that:
“Trying to eliminate Saddam, extending the ground war into an occupation of Iraq, would have violated our guideline about not changing objectives in midstream, engaging in “mission creep,” and would have incurred incalculable human and political costs.
“Apprehending him was probably impossible. We had been unable to find Noriega in Panama, which we knew intimately. We would have been forced to occupy Baghdad and, in effect, rule Iraq. The coalition would instantly have collapsed, the Arabs deserting it in anger and other allies pulling out as well.
“Under those circumstances, furthermore, we had been self-consciously trying to set a pattern for handling aggression in the post-cold war world. Going in and occupying Iraq, thus unilaterally exceeding the U.N.’s mandate, would have destroyed the precedent of international response to aggression we hoped to establish.
“Had we gone the invasion route, the U.S. could conceivably still be an occupying power in a bitterly hostile land. It would have been a dramatically different—and perhaps barren—outcome. “
https://www.globalpolicy.org/component/content/article/169/36409.html
Bush 43 was unimpressed with his father’s good judgement and his own crackpot utopian streak was on full display in his second State of the Union address, where he tasks the United States with ending tyranny in the world. It’s a vision Woodrow Wilson would have been proud to proclaim.
“So it is the policy of the United States to seek and support the growth of democratic movements and institutions in every nation and culture with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world. “