Perhaps not but not like the pre-existing alternative of endless no-fly-zones, periodic airstrikes would have stopped and Saddam probably would have acted out at some point. Post Gulf War Iraq was sorta like a sad cross between a North Korea cult of personality state that misbehaves as a geopolitical strategy and a failed African state with ongoing tribal, religious, and sectarian mayhem which goes on constantly unless held in check by the acts of a strongman leader who crushes all violence as threats to the regime. Iraq was blessed/cursed with oil however which means that there was no way the U.S. would just act in benign neglect to the catastrophes unfolding in Iraq like it does in Africa.
I'm not sure why you say no way. Because we absolutely did. We full on enabled it early on. We helped Saddam to piss off the Iranians after we were mad that they threw out our meddling. We knew he was doing other awful stuff but we were more focused on saving face over being embarrassed in Iran. We thought he'd be a dog we could control, but then realized he was worse than the Iranians and we just made him stronger.
And we have been meddling in Africa a lot as well. As seen by people going "what, we're doing military stuff in Africa?" after the ambush that set off that political firestorm. We've just hidden it more because we know it makes us look bad (both to ourselves and in the international community) and has often blown up in our faces.
Africa has tons of oil, and other materials that we would like, so that's not something the Middle East uniquely has. Hell, probably the major reason we haven't given up on Afghanistan is because they're sitting on tons of rare earth elements in the mountains, and we don't want China or someone else to gain control.
There was a interview with GHW Bush [senior] in the late 90s, and he was asked why he didn't take out Saddam when he could have during the Persian Gulf war. And his reply was actually a very good one and it was common sense, he said he didn't do it because it would turn the region into a tinderbox and that the Sunnis and the Shia would be at each other's throats. And he said this at a time when *most* Americans viewed muslims as a monolithic group of people who just dress funny, this was years before 9/11. So its not like our elected officials were unaware of this, because they were. Now I think GW Bush was just a complete idiot who took advantage of his massive public support after 9/11 [around 90% approval at the time] and he could do almost anything he wanted to, so we hit Afghanistan [which was warranted imo] but he used that support to go and try to remake Iraq too. It would cement his legacy as a great President when he turned Iraq into a prosperous Democracy, something along those lines. But of course it failed and anyone with sense could see that coming, even his father knew better, and Bernie Sanders [I lean right but i appreciate honesty when i see it and he slam dunked that one].
Bush Sr was, if anything, pragmatic. He was smart enough to know what it would take and what would happen if we went after Saddam. Not to mention we'd basically end up with a war with Iran immediately after, and a strong lasting presence in Iraq in order to keep the government in order and Iran from overthrowing it. We knew how it would go, and Bush Sr was competent enough to push back on the people that thought otherwise. Bush Jr wasn't and we saw exactly how things would have gone if we'd done that back then. It actually probably would've gone worse since we were stronger and Iraq was weaker in 2002-3.
I don't think Bush Jr himself was that malicious, but that made him easily manipulable. Which was then exploited by the festering pieces of shit that had taken control of the party. I could definitely see them using that assassination plot to get Bush on board.
I personally don't put that much on how people voted with regards to the Iraq invasion. Because we still see some people today condemning those that didn't support it, even knowing fully what a complete fuck-up it was. If it had gone even marginally better, those people would have no political capital (and likely would be outright blamed for the situation saying it undermined us and caused us to fail). Hell I think there's a lot of resentment over that which has helped fuel the extremism that Republicans have gone towards (lots of the people aren't mad that we invaded Iraq, they're mad that we didn't go scorched earth). Like you said, Bush had 90% approval rating, have fun going against that. Plus those representatives were lied to or given other arguments (i.e. we had an imperative to fix the situation as we were the ones that enabled Saddam to get the WMD back when we were supporting them during the Iraq-Iran War).
The reason why Bush didn't take out Saddam, is because Saddam was in the pocket of the US. Notice how the US was willing to arm, train, and fund his regime, right up until he went and invaded Kuwait. Kuwait had the US' oilfields, which Saddam wanted to take so he would have a bargaining chip, and that's not on; US backed dictators better not upset the corporations raping the region.
If you think that the US had some moral ideal in mind, you go tell that to all the Kurds that suffered mass slaughter and sexual enslavement under his regime, equipped with US arms and finances.
That doesn't make sense. Saddam had clearly broken that, so it would've been in the US's interest to depose him and put someone willing to fall in line. The US definitely had a hand in Saddam's rise in Iraq, but other countries actually did a lot of the arming. ("The
Soviet Union, France, and China together accounted for over 90% of the value of Iraq's arms imports between 1980 and 1988.") So its not like it was even a "West" issue. The US did have a big role in spinning it as Saddam was there to counterbalance the Islamic extremism bubbling out of Iran (which is why the USSR and China were on board even. But we quickly realized he was probably a bigger monster than the Iranians, so we shelved a lot of our support once we saw the reality (and seeing that he couldn't topple Iran, and now was a force to be reckoned with on his own, we basically setup one of the worst outcomes and the total opposite of what we wanted). And then when he bit the hand that fed by trying to get the Kuwaiti oil, he was gonna get hit hard as a way to keep him in check.
Absolutely, but that's been true far more than Americans want to admit. They look for ways to justify it using lies and half-truths (for Desert Storm:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nayirah_testimony), to try and give them a moral standpoint.
That situation is actually what really pushed us from supporting to looking for ways to do something about Saddam (we officially supported his claim that Iran was the one that did it, but we knew the truth and we were already changing our support of him as we saw how terrible he was and how we were actually making him stronger while finding Iran wasn't as easy to overthrow as we thought, so helping Saddam wasn't helping our original aims). Now, we knew he was a monster before then (and even knowing that, still helped his rise, as we felt for a while that Iran was the worse enemy, so we wanted to help him take Iran down, and hoped that the war of attrition would leave both weakened and thus more willing to play ball once it was over). We were at the same time arming Iran, and were happy with the war of attrition, hoping that the end result would be a weak Saddam led Iraq, that we hoped would be easy to control. And then we realized that Iran wasn't so easy to take down, and we had just made another monster to deal with.
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