The New Year Quote by Les Aspin

Aspin’s line is a politician’s version of the “I told you so,” delivered before the phrase became fashionable. He’s drawing a bright procedural border around the first Gulf War: the U.N. resolution authorized expelling Iraq from Kuwait, not regime change. That legalistic framing isn’t just pedantry; it’s a shield against the perennial Washington temptation to treat battlefield momentum as a blank check.

The subtext is all about restraint as foresight. “Frankly” signals a bid for plainspoken credibility, but it also smuggles in a warning: toppling Saddam sounds clean on cable news, then turns into the unpaid bill of governance. Aspin’s phrase “inherited an even bigger mess” recasts victory as liability. The real argument is that removing a dictator doesn’t remove the country’s fractures; it hands them to the invader. His point lands harder because he’s not denying the regime’s brutality. He’s insisting that moral clarity is not an operational plan.

Context matters. In the early 1990s, the U.S. had just demonstrated overwhelming force, yet it was already grappling with the aftershocks of war: displacement, humanitarian crises, the awkward responsibility of “stability” without occupation. Aspin is reading the map of second-order consequences: who governs, who polices, what happens to sectarian and regional rivalries once the lid is off. It’s a compact critique of maximalism, and, in hindsight, an eerie preview of the post-2003 dilemma he describes without naming.