What would Dad think?

I mean current President George W. Bush's father - the 41st president of the United States, George H.W. Bush - of his son's ouster of Saddam Hussein and occupation of Iraq?

"Trying to eliminate Saddam, extending the ground war into an occupation of Iraq, would have violated our guideline ... and would have incurred incalculable human and political costs. Apprehending him was probably impossible ... We would have been forced to occupy Baghdad and, in effect, rule Iraq. The coalition would instantly have collapsed, the Arabs deserting it in anger and other allies pulling out as well ... Going in and occupying Iraq, thus unilaterally exceeding the U.N.'s mandate, would have destroyed the precedent of international response to aggression we hoped to establish. Had we gone the invasion route, the U.S. could conceivably still be an occupying power in a bitterly hostile land. It would have been a dramatically different — and perhaps barren — outcome."

• A World Transformed (1998) by George H.W. Bush and Brent Scowcroft; also as an excerpt in Time Magazine in 1998.