DISAPPEARING BUSH AND SKOWCROFT [oops!] ARTICLE

Thank God for paper and ink. Read this post, and accompanying article, at The Memory Hole (link via cursor). Time magazine used to have an article in the March 2 1998 edition entitled "Why we didn't remove Saddam," and written by Bush, Sr. and Brent Skowcroft. Now the electronic evidence of such an article has been erased from their website. Go ahead: try searching for it at Time's site, which you can access at this link. Creepy.

It's not that there's anything particularly troubling in the article itself, except for Bush and Skowcroft's unwaivering sense that invasion and occupation of Iraq would have been a bad idea:

We were disappointed that Saddam's defeat did not break his hold on power, as many of our Arab allies had predicted and we had come to expect. President Bush repeatedly declared that the fate of Saddam Hussein was up to the Iraqi people. Occasionally, he indicated that removal of Saddam would be welcome, but for very practical reasons there was never a promise to aid an uprising. While we hoped that popular revolt or coup would topple Saddam, neither the U.S. nor the countries of the region wished to see the breakup of the Iraqi state. We were concerned about the long-term balance of power at the head of the Gulf. Trying to eliminate Saddam, extending the ground war into an occupation of Iraq, would have violated our guideline about not changing objectives in midstream, engaging in "mission creep," and would have incurred incalculable human and political costs. Apprehending him was probably impossible. We had been unable to find Noriega in Panama, which we knew intimately. 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. Under those circumstances, furthermore, we had been self-consciously trying to set a pattern for handling aggression in the post-cold war world. 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.
[. . .]
The Gulf War had far greater significance to the emerging post-cold war world than simply reversing Iraqi aggression and restoring Kuwait. Its magnitude and significance impelled us from the outset to extend our strategic vision beyond the crisis to the kind of precedent we should lay down for the future. From an American foreign-policymaking perspective, we sought to respond in a manner which would win broad domestic support and which could be applied universally to other crises. In international terms, we tried to establish a model for the use of force. First and foremost was the principle that aggression cannot pay. If we dealt properly with Iraq, that should go a long way toward dissuading future would-be aggressors. We also believed that the U.S. should not go it alone, that a multilateral approach was better. This was, in part, a practical matter. Mounting an effective military counter to Iraq's invasion required the backing and bases of Saudi Arabia and other Arab states.

I'm not saying that Bush I was right and Bush II is wrong; I'm not decided on any of this, although as I've made clear, I'm not sure that this war was a good idea, and I'm not sure about the first Gulf War either. There are a lot of things I need to know about both to be clear on either. But go read the rest of the article, at any rate. The fact that Time-Warner doesn't want you to should be reason enough to do so.

Needless to say, this episode in Time's apparent retrospective self-censorship highlights one of the dangers of a world of total digital information storage, but also the sheer difficulty of annihilating information (if that's what Time wanted to do) in an age of easy access to the internet. I also found the article on Infotrac through SUNY-Oswego's library. I hope that there is also a paper copy somewhere within reach. . .

UPDATE: They seem to be having major web-related problems with their articles database over at Time.com, so perhaps there really is nothing sinister here at all. Who knows. The archives search on their site is all screwed up; I just tried several searches and still couldn't find the article. Perhaps the searches just target a description of the article, which would be very silly since the content of that description may not match up with whatever keywords you're looking for (including title and authors). But the fact that the article disappeared from the digital table of contents from the original issue in which it appeared (see the article at memory hole again) is weird. Digital glitch and crappy database or corporate self-censorhip? You decide.

MORE: As Eric is kind enough to point out, I spelled Scowcroft's name wrong. OOPS! As a testimony to my less-than-stellar abilities here, I have left the original spelling in the original posts (this will also serve as a personal reminder for the future). Searches at Time, this time with the correct author, still didn't turn up the article.