"I think for us to get American military personnel involved in a civil war inside Iraq would literally be a quagmire. Once we got to Baghdad, what would we do? Who would we put in power? What kind of government? Would it be a Sunni government, a Shia government, a Kurdish government?
"Would it be secular, along the lines of the Baath party? Would it be fundamentalist Islamic?
"I do not think the United States wants to have U.S. military forces accept casualties and accept responsibility of trying to govern Iraq. It makes no sense at all."
Dick Cheney (then defense secretary in the first Bush administration), March 1991, when was asked on ABC-TV why Operation Desert Storm had not gone all the way to remove Saddam Hussein from power.
