In a New York Times article on October 8, 1992, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Colin Powell wrote “that the United States should not intervene in Bosnia because the conflict has ‘deep ethnic and religious roots that go back a thousand years.’ Nor should America aid the Iraqi insurgents, lest it end up ‘trying to sort out two thousand years of Mesopotamian history.’ America, Powell had said, should act only in those instances where ‘the cold calculus of national interest’ was at stake.”
– Lawrence F. Kaplan and William Kristol, The War Over Iraq, Page 69