US History 1973 - 2014 Commonplace Book: Lecture 16, The Gulf War & Bush 41's Foreign Policy (Con't)

Interviewer: Do you think the U.S., or U.N. forces, should have moved into Baghdad?
Cheney: No.... Because if we'd gone to Baghdad we would have been all alone. There wouldn't have been anybody else with us. It would have been a U.S. occupation of Iraq. None of the Arab forces that were willing to fight with us in Kuwait were willing to invade Iraq. Once you got to Iraq and took it over, and took down Saddam Hussein's government, then what are you going to put in its place?... It's a quagmire if you go that far and try to take over Iraq. The other thing was casualties.... And the question for the president, in terms of whether or not we went on to Baghdad, and took additional casualties in an effort to get Saddam Hussein, was how many additional dead Americans is Saddam worth? And our judgment was, not very many, and I think we got it right.

—Bush 41's Secretary of Defense, Dick Cheney, in 1994

Introduction to (and explanation of) this quote series can be found here.  Read this tag to see all of them.