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From Correspondent Ralph Begleiter and wire reports
January 16, 1996
Web posted at: 12:45 a.m. EST
WASHINGTON (CNN) -- On the fifth anniversary of the beginning of the Gulf War, U.S. officials are still debating its outcome and its success. Iraqi President Saddam Hussein remains in power, but the U.S. President and military leaders who led the war against him have left office, retired or found new occupations.
"I think maybe in retrospect we could have done more," former President George Bush conceded in an interview to be broadcast Tuesday on PBS. (128K AIFF sound or 128K WAV sound)
In a retrospective interview with David Frost, Bush said he erred in thinking that Saddam would fall from power, and that he should have sought the Iraqi leader's personal surrender.
"The ending wasn't quite as clean as it might have been if Saddam Hussein had come to the tent, laid down his (sword) and maybe left office."
The former U.S. president suggested that the United States should have insisted on stricter military limits for the Iraqi army after the war. Bush insisted that the U.S.-led coalition did not have a legal mandate to assassinate Saddam or overthrow his regime, arguing that was not the mission U.S. led forces set out to achieve. Nevertheless, Bush said he would not have minded if Saddam had been killed in the war.
"Saddam Hussein was the commander-in-chief of the Iraqi forces, and if his life had been snuffed out in a bombing attack or something -- too bad," Bush said. "That's one of the prices of war."
Calling Saddam "wacko," the former U.S. commander-in-chief said he would have risked impeachment to go forward with military action against Iraq for its invasion of Kuwait even if Congress had not approved it.
"I know I would have gone forward against Saddam," Bush said. "I expected that impeachment papers would have been filed immediately if we'd gone into battle without sanction by the Congress."
The war against Iraq began January 16, 1991, in retaliation for Iraq's invasion of Kuwait in August 1990.
On related issues, Bush said the United States "had to lean on" Israel to convince it not to retaliate against Iraqi missile attacks. He concluded that the international coalition would have disintegrated if Israel had launched retaliatory air attacks against Iraq.
"All hell would have broken lose."
"The ending wasn't quite as clean as it might have been if Saddam Hussein had come to the tent, laid down his (sword) and maybe left office."
-- Former President George Bush
When Israel proposed air strikes, coalition forces refused to release the secret codes that would have signaled allied forces not to strike back. Bush said the decision not to reveal the codes was in Israel's best interest.
"And we said, " Bush told Frost, "we're not going to give you the codes, and thus your aircraft are going to be flying and exposed to the threat of friendly fire. And they did not like that."
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