While speaking on BBC Radio 4 on February 16, 1992, Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney said, in reference to the decision not to topple Saddam after the 1991 Gulf War: ” ‘If we’d gone to Baghdad and got rid of Saddam Hussein–assuming we could have found him–we’d have had to put a lot of forces in and run him to ground some place. He would not have been easy to capture. Then you’ve got to put a new government in his place and then you’re faced with the question of what kind of government are you going to establish in Iraq? Is it going to be a Kurdish government or a Shiite government or a Sunni government? How many forces are you going to take through the course of this operation?’ ”
– Con Coughlin, Saddam: His Rise and Fall, Page 277