In a speech at the National Press Club on May 20, 1992, Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney said he was ‘comfortable’ with the fact that Operation Desert Storm did not try to unseat Saddam from power in Iraq. ” ‘We could have gone on,’ he told reporters nearly fifteen months after the end of the war. U.S. troops could have captured Baghdad, but ‘I don’t know how we would have let go of that tar baby once we had grabbed hold of it. …How many additional American casualties would we have had to suffer? How many additional American lives is Saddam Hussein worth? And the answer I would give is not very damn many.’ ”
– Karen DeYoung, Soldier: The Life of Colin Powell, Page 211