No kidding!
Imagine if we simply took Saddam out.
No need for a No-Fly Zone.
No need to station troops permanently in Saudi Arabia.
No Khobar Towers. I had been there months earlier. Only luck didn’t place me in it when the truck exploded.
No “Infidels in the Holy Land” outrage from Bin Laden (although he would probably grab on to something else).
No 9/11.
No invasion of Afghanistan.
No Powell “If you break it, you own it” nation building disasters.
I was in the Kingdom for the entire Desert Shield/Storm. I went to Kuwait two days after the cease fire. I flew over the burning oil fields in a helicopter and then drove thru them including the “Mile of Death”. It was a surreal scene. We landed around noon descending thru a pitch black cloud of smoke. The sun looked like a pale disk.
We had the perfect pretext to wipe out Saddam’s “elite” troops and remove him from power. Scowcroft maintained that this was not the mission of the international coalition.
Bush later got a nice bonus from the Kuwaitis after he left the WH.
Iraq would have dissolved into chaos with very uncertain consequences. But one fairly certain consequence would have been lots of dead people especially the ones Saddam was sort of protecting.