Who said the following?
“If you’re going to go in and try to topple Saddam Hussein, you have to go to Baghdad. Once you’ve got Baghdad, it’s not clear what you do with it. It’s not clear what kind of government you would put in place of the one that’s currently there now. Is it going to be a Shia regime, a Sunni regime or a Kurdish regime? Or one that tilts toward the Baathists, or one that tilts toward the Islamic fundamentalists? How much credibility is that government going to have if it’s set up by the United States military when it’s there? How long does the United States military have to stay to protect the people that sign on for that government, and what happens to it once we leave?”
Answer and citation under the More link.
These words were spoken by then-Defense Secretary Dick Cheney in 1991, quoted in the New York Times and cited by Tim Noah, who found the cite via this Daily Howler article.
As Noah notes, Cheney isn’t quite so interested in those questions now, but James Fallows is.