Sunday's news of Saddam Hussein's capture is not merely an indication that the U.S. and England have accomplished their 2003 mission. Hussein's capture represents the accomplishment of a much older goal--the goal of President Bush's father when he first went into Iraq.

[...]

So much for the official line. But as Americans, Europeans and Iraqis knew, the first President Bush, for all his diplomatic experience, did not see Desert Storm in entirely Wilsonian terms. He also saw the allied action as a moral campaign, something that fitted in with his WW II experience as a Navy pilot.

In a letter to his children on the last day of 1991, he wrote: "How many lives might have been saved if appeasement had given way to force earlier on in the late 1930s or earliest 1940s?" In the same letter he concluded, sounding very much like the son we have come to know in the current conflict: "I look at today's crisis as `good' vs. `evil.' Yes, it is that clear."

[link|http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/opinion/oped/chi-0312160347dec16,1,621928.story?coll=chi-newsopinioncommentary-hed|source]

I can just see the Bush family at Christmas dinner: "Hey daddy, I promised you that I'd get that sumabitch who tried to kill you 10 years ago, and by golly, I didn't care how many billions of taxpayer dollars it was gonna cost me, I mean them, I was gonna get that bastard! And see, I got that mean ol' Saddam guy who put a contract out on you, didn't I? Neil and Jeb didn't do jack about it, but I did it! How's about an "atta boy!" or even a pat on the head. Dad?"