Why did'NT bush want to invade Baghdad in the gulf war?

Answer 1

The 1991 Gulf War was authorized and directed under a UNSC mandate at ejecting Iraqi forces from Kuwait which they illegally invaded to seize it's gold and oil fields there. The UNSC did not authorized a mandate at extending the war onto Baghdad and order regime change aka the removal of Saddam Hussein in Iraq. That's the principal reason why U.S. and Coalition forces didn't continue onto Baghdad, plus we didn't have a viable exit plan to get out of Iraq once you accepted the responsibility of governing the country after removing Saddam from power. There is an old saying goes that, "If you break it, you own it".

Also many feared if we do that, the international coalition that the U.S. put up would collapse and that removing Saddam would created an anarchy in the region.

Also after the 1991 Gulf War ceasefire, the Kurds in the north and Shiites in the south of Iraq rebelled against Saddam Hussein's rule and hope to stage a coup in overthrowing Saddam from power. They also expected help from the Coalition since Bush Senior encouraged the Iraqis to take the matters into their own hands and overthrow Saddam Hussein. However no support from the Coalition came to help the rebels and as a result, the rebellion was brutally crushed by Iraq's elite Republican Guard while U.S. and Coalition forces present on Iraqi soil after the ceasefire sit back and did nothing. Even when the USAF was flying overhead over Iraq seeing the Iraqi helicopters did strafing runs on Kurdish and Shiite refugees fleeing from the uprising but did not intervene to help them. One of the reasons why the U.S. and Coalition did not aid the rebels because again, the UNSC mission was to eject Iraq from Kuwait, not toppling Saddam Hussein in Baghdad.

But as the news reached to the world into what happened in the uprising, in April of 1991, the UNSC then authorized a safe haven to Kurdish refugees who were stuck in the mountains of northern Iraq and the Coalition launched Operation Provide Comfort to help the refugees fleeing from the uprising. For the first time in history, a no-fly zone in northern Iraq was established by the U.S. and Coalition forces to protect the Kurds from air attacks by the Iraqi Air Force.

A year later, a no-fly zone in southern Iraq was established to protect the Shiites from air attacks by the Iraqi Air Force in which they continued to slaugheter them during the remainder of 1991 and in the middle of 1992.

During the last 12 years of the Gulf War ceasefire, U.S. and Coalition forces as well as the UN continued to reengage hostilties against Iraq, something that most of the mass media ignored:

U.S. and Coalition aircraft continue to bomb Iraq in the no-fly zones because they were provoked by Iraqi radar locks and missile attacks. attacks which they are not allowed to do.

In June 1993, President Clinton ordered a cruise missile attack on Baghdad because Saddam's agents was trying to assassinate former President Bush Senior during his visit to Kuwait in mid April for revenge in his role of driving Iraq from Kuwait in the 1991 Gulf War.

Saddam massed over 80,000 Iraqi troops into the Kuwaiti border in October 1994 in attempt to reinvade Kuwait because of UN sanctions on Iraq which was still in place after the 1991 Gulff War.

Clinton bombed Iraq again in September 1996 because Saddam was attempting to launch an Iraqi military offensive into restricted areas of the Kurdish villages in northern Iraq.

and so on.

During the last 12 years, Saddam also throwed out UN inspectors from trying to get to his WMDs program. This is the reasons why the U.S. launched an invasion of Iraq in 2003 because of Saddam's violation of that terms from the ceasefire of the 1991 war.