In an August 14, 1992, speech to the Discovery Institute in Seattle, Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney said, regarding the decision to pull out of Iraq without invading Baghdad or overthrowing Saddam: ” ‘I don’t think you could have done all of that without significant additional U.S. casualties. And while everybody was tremendously impressed with the low cost of the (1991) conflict, for the 146 Americans who were killed in action and for their families, it wasn’t a cheap war. And the question in my mind is how many additional American casualties is Saddam (Hussein) worth? And the answer is not that damned many. So, I think we got it right, both when we decided to expel him from Kuwait, but also when the president [Bush Sr.] made the decision that we’d achieved our objectives and we were not going to go get bogged down in the problems of trying to take over and govern Iraq.’ ”
– Joel Connelly, “In the Northwest: Bush-Cheney Flip-Flops Cost America in Blood,” Seattle Post-Intelligencer, September 28, 2004