According to an interview with Dick Cheney for Frontline: The Gulf War, which first aired on January 9, 1996: ” ‘I was not an enthusiast about getting U.S. forces and going into Iraq,’ Cheney later said. ‘We were there in the southern part of Iraq to the extent we needed to be there to defeat his [Saddam Hussein’s] forces and to get him out of Kuwait, but the idea of going into Baghdad, for example, or trying to topple the regime wasn’t anything I was enthusiastic about. I felt there was a real danger here that you would get bogged down in a long drawn-out conflict, that this was a dangerous, difficult part of the world.’ ”
– Thomas E. Ricks, Fiasco, Page 6