Kurdistan, Deferred
A commenter at Eschaton named Phila says that he, unlike many of his anti-war friends who never gave a damn about human rights abuses in Saddamite Iraq, was in support of the 1988 Prevention of Genocide Act (see here, too).
I don’t think I even knew about that Act (not incidentally, one that was never passed), but upon reading through it, one is struck by its futility. We were still using Iraq as a tool against Iran in those days and had not yet transitioned over to the posture that we would assume a few years later during the Gulf War. The Act was full of economic measures and, vaguely, the threat of military action, but nothing would come of it because the logic of the Cold War was still in effect: containment, triangulation, and no nation-building.
We have had our sights set on Iraq for a very long time now.
In going to war for Iraq, Bush the Younger was only the decider.
