An all-out hawk, Richard Nixon was sure Hussein would be a threat after the Gulf War. He also knew what lay ahead - civil war - and seemed to recognize the need for the country to be partioned. From Crowley's Nixon in Winter:
Nixon was distressed. "There are a number of problems with this cease-fire coming now...They're [the] classic problems in the aftermath of a war. First, what is the fate of Hussien? It's a grave mistake to leave him in power. Second, there was no word directly from him on this case-fire, so why should we let up?"After the war, Hussein began brutally tamping down dissent. The debate within the Administration was whether or not to leave the Afghan rebels hanging since some said it the Administration had encouraged them to rebel and thus was responsible for helping:
Nixon believed that although the military and political objectives had been achieved the United States should have kept the pressure on Hussein and left him unable to rebuild his armed forces and resume his dictatorship.
The chaotic situation in Iraq that this debate spawned indicated to Nixon that we should have advanced to Baghdad while we had the Iraqi troops in a rout, removed Hussein, and destroyed more military hardware.
The second point of debate was the question of where our policy was caught up in its own contradictions. We called for Hussein's overthrow but opposed Iraq's dismemberment; we called for the Iraqi people to rise up against Hussein, but we were unwilling to help them do the job; and if we did not assist the rebels, Hussein would stay in power, and normal relations would be impossible, but if we did help them, we would involve ourselves in their civil war.
Nixon argued that the United States should have removed the source of the turmoil root and branch...The rebel uprisings in Iraq were the logical extension of the American-led war against the Iraqi people's oppressor, Saddam Hussein, but the United States was not prepared to deal with the consequences. The Kurds wanted their own state, apart from Iraq, and the Shiites demanded protection for their own minority, and both faced brutal suppression by the rearming Iraqi forces...On April 15, Nixon did a live interview with CNN's Bernard Shaw, during which he said what many others were thinking: "We should get the CIA to take out Saddam."
Had we removed Hussein, the minorities in Iraq would not have faced the brutal denial of rights to which they were now subjected. But Turkish president Turgut Ozal argued persuasively to Bush that a stable Iraq under Hussein was preferable to a chaotic Iraq without him, and the administration thus adopted a hands-off policy.
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