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Originally Posted by tanuki
A few possibly relevant points on this. First, Saddam would never have agreed to the cease fire if it was contingent on his removal and possible trial for crimes against humanity.
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It's not like he would have had much choice, US forces were 50 miles away from Bagdad with no iraqi forces in postion to stop them.
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Originally Posted by tanuki
He would have continued to tell his people that they were winning and then sent them gladly into a coalition forces meat grinder to protect his own highly overvalued butt.
Second, the coalition in the first gulf war was too large and with the forced removal of Saddam there would have been too many foreign cooks trying to season the Iraqi pot to their own specific tastes by picking Saddam's replacement. The Iraqi people, if the choice was left up to them, would have probably sunk to the level of civil warfare over the issue of which factions (sunni, shite, kurd, etc.) choice would be the one to replace Saddam.
Third, Bush Sr. had more sense than his son in understanding what a costly pain-in-the-ass it would be for precious little tangible gain to go into Iraq and remove Saddam, and then need to assume the task of nation building to deal with the destabalizing political power vacuum which would follow Saddam's sudden removal by foreign forces from outside of Iraq.
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At the time the Iraqi people didn't have the resentment towards the US that a decade of heavy sanctions built up. They knew saddam was wrong, and probably would have accepted a new leader if the US didn't shake things up too much and left a lot of the existing power structure in place. There was no real need to take apart the entire government. Sure it still wouldn't have been a democracy, but does every country on earth have to be one? Maybe put the Iraqi prime minister in charge of the government. That way there wouldn't have been the chaos that followed the complete distruction of the Iraqi government. Plus, since he was someone already in the Iraqi government, the other nations involved probably wouldn't have had any strong objections, and it would leave a lot of the old system in place. I'm not saying the guy was any better than saddam, but he did seem smart enough to realize that cooperating with the US would be a better approach.
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Originally Posted by tanuki
Since the main objective of the coalition going in was to drive invading Iraqi forces out of Kuwait and put a stop to Saddam's aggression towards neighboring countries...that much could be accomplished through heavy reliance on aircraft/smartbombs and using the stockpile of tomahawk cruise missles Ronald Reagan built-up during his presidency. Leaving Saddam in power, but with his military forces so trashed that the primary danger they posed was to the Iraqi people who were stuck dealing with the nut. Removal of Saddam was then left as an internal political problem for the Iraqi people to deal with. Unfortunately, as we saw no matter how tight the sanction screw was tightened nor how bad things became for the Iraqi people as a result, no popular uprising ever materialized in Iraq to remove Saddam.
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As you say, that's because we left saddam with too much of his military, which enabled him to crush any attempted uprising before it was a threat. Even if we decided not to remove him, if we would have kept up the attack for one more day, the military forces used to suppress the kurds and others would have been destroyed.