George HW Bush on Fox News

"G.H.W. BUSH: My favorite picture is a picture of American soldiers surrounding a guy in a foxhole, Iraqi soldier, and the American guy says, "We're not going to harm you. We're American soldiers."

WALLACE: This really brings back the sacrifice, doesn't it, sir?

G.H.W. BUSH: Sure does. You see, that side of the war never got — the fact that we treated those people with respect in spite of the fact that they were the enemy was really good.

WALLACE: Then some final thoughts about the decisions he had to make.

G.H.W. BUSH: I still think Saddam Hussein thought he would — one, we wouldn't fight and, two, if we did fight, somehow talked himself into believing he'd win in the ground war.

WALLACE: And then the decision to end it...

G.H.W. BUSH: Yeah.

WALLACE: ... when we were slaughtering them — and again, I mean, I...

G.H.W. BUSH: I think we made the right decision. I've subsequently been criticized for that. But we had an objective. We formed a coalition based on not killing Saddam, not conquering, capturing Baghdad, but on ending the war, ending the aggression. And we did it.

And so we did what we said we were going to do. Had we not done that, that coalition would have fallen apart in a minute."

I can only wonder what his son thinks of these statements. Now that we have such parsing of words of what is and isn't torture..... or of what's left of this weak coalition in Iraq now. And to think of all that unheeded sage advice from Brent Scrowcroft and other Bush 41 advisers that could've stopped this.