winterbadger | Bush Sr. on Iraq

I think Gary Trudeau has used this quote or a similar one in one of his strips in the last month or so. This comes from The Iraq War Reader (which I just picked up the other day, and whihc looks an excellent source) and is, in turn, an excerpt from A World Transformed by George H.W. Bush and Brent Scowcroft.

Trying to eliminate Saddam, extending the ground war into an occupation of Iraq... would have incurred incalculable human and political costs. ... Going in and occupying Iraq, thus unilaterally exceeding the United Nations' mandate, would have destroyed the precedent of international response to aggression that we had hoped to establish. Had we gone the invasion route, the Untied States could conceivably still be an occupying power in a bitterly hostile land. It would have been a dramatically different--and perhaps barren--outcome.