Thank God Bush the First was too busy to spend much time with Dubya when he was little...that's probably the only reason Dubya shows such courage on the international front today. And, contrary to his otherwise extremely classy personality, Bush the First still does not have the balls to admit he totally erred and screwed the Iraqi people by failing to support regime change.
"Oh our Arab coalition partners would have left us, we wouldn't have had enough troops in theatre..." Where were the Arab coalition partners this time? We seemed to do OK with most of them against us! And numbers? We're wasting the remnants of the Ba'athists with a fraction of our former strength! I get red in the face with anger anytime I see Bush the First cover for himself on this issue...doesn't he realize he totally undermines Dubya's credibility by doing so?
My memory is a bit unclear here: did Bush actually refuse to support them, or were we held back from doing so by the UN?
Now, I'll agree that it was wrong to encourage an uprising, if Bush knew that we couldn't support it. But, I'm not that he knew the UN would stop him (if they indeed did).
I don't recall President Bush killing anyone. In case you missed it, Saddam Hussein and his RG goons were doing all the killing. Yes, it was tragic, but this revisionist history trying to pin blame elsewhere is getting old.
I strongly suspect that Bush the First has admitted this to Bush the Second privately, along with a passionate message of how horribly it has haunted him. Yes, Bush the Second wanted to finish his daddy's work, but for all the right reasons. I really hope the two Bushes will write down the story of their father-son discussions on this topic, and sock it away in a vault for public release at a safe and appropriate time -- long after both of them are gone from this world. It would be a great loss to history if they didn't.