Feb. 3 - Barbra Streisand is finally agreeing with George Bush. George H. Bush that is. In a posting on her Web site, the outspoken anti-war diva quotes a passage from "A World Transformed," a book by the father of the current president and former National Security Advisor Brent Scowcroft, explaining why it would have been unwise to try to remove Saddam Hussein from power at the end of the Gulf War.
TRYING TO eliminate Saddam, extending the ground war into an occupation of Iraq, would have...incurred incalculable human and political costs, Streisand quotes the book as saying.
"We would have been forced to occupy Baghdad and, in effect, rule Iraq. . . . Going in and occupying Iraq, thus unilaterally exceeding the United Nations’ mandate, would have destroyed the precedent of international response to aggression that we hoped to establish. Had we gone the invasion route, the United States could conceivably still be an occupying power in a bitterly hostile land. It would have been a dramatically different and perhaps barren outcome."
Streisand calls the elder Bush’s statement "so incredibly relevant right now," and quotes the person who brought the passage to her attention as saying, "You know we’re in trouble when George Bush, Sr. is the most rational member of the family." MSNBC
You know we're in trouble when we give a rat's patootey about Barbra's analysis of foreign policy.