Eagleburger: U.S. should have ousted Hussein

Eagleburger: "I didn't hear anyone making the argument very strenuously" to go after Hussein.

By Matt Smith
and David Williams
CNN

(CNN) -- Former Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger said Tuesday it was a mistake to leave Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein in power at the end of the 1991 Persian Gulf War.

Eagleburger, who was deputy secretary of state during the war, was one of many who advised the first President Bush not to push on to Baghdad after Iraqi troops withdrew from Kuwait.

But he told CNN on Tuesday that "in retrospect I'm not sure we were correct."

Eagleburger told participants in a CNN.com online chat that without knowing who would have replaced Hussein "it would be a close call in either case."

"In the end, while I thoroughly understand and totally supported President Bush's decision not to pursue Saddam personally, I am now prepared to admit that it was probably a mistake."

In a later interview, Eagleburger said the decision was not particularly controversial within Bush's inner circle: "I didn't hear anyone making the argument very strenuously, quite frankly."

Besides diplomats such as Eagleburger, top U.S. military commanders counseled against pursuing Hussein as well, he said.

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Eagleburger said there were many reasons for not going after Hussein.

"We had declared that our purpose was to drive the Iraqis out of Kuwait," he said in the online chat. "We never said our purpose was to replace the Iraqi leadership."

Further, he said, the United States was not willing to commit troops to Iraq for an extended time, and there was little support from Washington's Arab allies for such a move.

"One of the things that was clearly a part of the president's decision was that all of his generals were telling him it was time to leave," Eagleburger said.

The generals included Colin Powell, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who is now secretary of state, and Norman Schwarzkopf, commander of U.S. forces in the region, he said.

The decision to limit U.S. military action to pushing Iraqi troops out of Kuwait has been strongly criticized in the decade since the war.

But few in the first Bush administration have publicly questioned the decision not to topple Hussein.

"I'm not sure very many people have had an opportunity to say anything about it," Eagleburger said. "I wouldn't have said anything about it except that it came up today.

"Probably some of them don't believe it was a mistake, and for those who do ... people don't often like to admit they're wrong. I'm not even sure I'm right when I say it was a mistake."

In their 1998 book, "A World Transformed," the elder Bush and his national security adviser, Brent Scowcroft, defended the decision, saying that toppling Hussein would have been unacceptable to the Arab countries in the U.S.-led coalition and risked turning the Iraqi dictator into an Arab hero.

"Am I happy he's there? No," Bush said in a PBS interview after the book's publication. "But we had a mission; we defined it, and thanks to the heroism of a lot of young Americans we fulfilled that mission."

Several of the elder Bush's top aides now serve in his son's administration -- among them Powell and Vice President Dick Cheney, who was defense secretary.

Since the September 11 attacks some observers have urged the current President Bush to investigate whether Iraq had anything to do with them and to make Hussein the next target of the campaign against terrorism.

"There is no question that Saddam has been a pain in the neck ever since," Eagleburger said in his online chat. "There is little question in my mind that he has supported terrorism, including Osama bin Laden, with money and support.

"There is no question in my mind that if given a chance, Saddam will again try to become the bully on the block in his part of the world."

Eagleburger led the State Department during the last year of the first Bush administration. He is now a consultant and chairman of a commission on Holocaust-era insurance claims.