Sixty-nine percent of Americans believed that Saddam Hussein was personally responsible for 9/11 when we invaded Iraq. That is the biggest failure of the media I have ever seen.
America was cool with Saddam Hussein when he was killing Iranians.
I left Kurdistan in April 2003 with the peshmerga, following their excited advance as Saddam’s forces crumbled. First Kirkuk, then Mosul – where looters broke into the city museum and seized its Parthian sculptures – then Tikrit. I reported from Baghdad in month-long stints until the end of 2004.
But I want to just caution, it is not incumbent on the United States to prove that Saddam Hussein is trying to acquire weapons of mass destruction. He’s already demonstrated that he’s trying to acquire weapons of mass destruction.
There are two ways to fight the United States military: asymmetrically and stupid. Asymmetrically means you’re going to try to avoid our strengths. In the 1991 Gulf War, it’s like we called Saddam’s army out into the schoolyard and beat up that army.
Nostalgia for dead tyrants and the longing for heroes are unhealthy, and they can result in the deification of a Saddam as easily as a Havel or Mandela.
In the post-9/11 world you cannot give him the benefit of the doubt. As a result of our going into Iraq, not only is Saddam Hussein gone, but Qaddafi has given up his weapons of mass destruction and tremendous progress is being made in Iraq.
In Iraq during the days of Saddam, I had a government minder who followed me everywhere, reported on my activities.
Weapons of mass destruction are the greatest threat to life on earth. Biological weapons are often called the poor man’s atomic bomb. Saddam Hussein is the ruler who has for decades been making the most determined and diabolical illegal effort to acquire them.
Actually, if you look at the essence of ISIS, how it came about, it’s the product of foreign invasion. Foreign invasion in Iraq led to removal of Saddam Hussein, and we’re not unhappy with that, but the point is that foreign presence in any territory has created dynamics. And you cannot avoid those dynamics.
It is now conventional wisdom that Americans do not care why we went to war in Iraq, that it is enough that the world is better off without Saddam Hussein.
If Saddam rejects peace and we have to use force, our purpose is clear. We want to seriously diminish the threat posed by Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction program.
After they killed Uday and Qusay, the focus centered on Saddam: Find him, kill him, capture him, whatever it takes. To me, it was a false sense of security: If we get Saddam, we’re going to win this war.
It has been, after all, 11 years, more than a decade now, of defiance of U.N. resolutions by Saddam Hussein. Every obligation that he signed onto after the Gulf War, so that he would not be a threat to peace and security, he has ignored and flaunted.
I am an opponent of Saddam Hussein, but an opponent also, of the sanctions that have killed a million Iraqi children and an opponent of the United States’ apparent desire to plunge the Middle East into a new and devastating war.
Saddam Hussein’s trial would not be public since he could name countries and persons whom he gave money.
I can support going in after Saddam Hussein, but I want to make sure I don’t go alone.
Saddam Hussein was an odious dictator, but he was also a very effective opponent of Iran. He was also a very effective opponent of al-Qaida.
I don’t think anybody can take the word of Saddam Hussein and his regime, and certainly an American president and allies who are obligated to worry about the safety and security of our countries, cannot take the word of this dictator, who lies, pathologically lies.
As brutal as Saddam Hussein was, it was a mistake to just eliminate him. The same is true for Moammar Gadhafi and for Libya, which is now a failed state.
The first time I went to Iraq was October 2002, when Saddam was still in power, and then, subsequently, in January of 2003, about three-and-a-half months before the U.S. invasion. So, I got to see the before and after of Iraq, basically, before and after the war.
When we went to Iraq, we stayed in one of Saddam’s palaces. It was kind of creepy. If those walls could talk, there’s no telling what stories they’d tell.
Kim Jong-un’s style is more suggestive of Saddam Hussein or his murderous son, Uday Hussein.
The United States encouraged Iraqis to rise up after Saddam Hussein’s army was driven out of Kuwait. Washington assumed Saddam was weak after losing the 1991 Gulf War. Iraqis rose up, but Saddam’s troops killed thousands – Iraqis say tens of thousands – in a counter-offensive.
Once it was suggested that Saddam Hussein might give his weaponry to terrorists, or might use weapons himself in the region, then it became hard for the Democrats to say, ‘Well, that can’t happen.’
Saddam Hussein played a terrible game of trying to deceive the world that he had weapons of mass destruction. Everyone bought it. The United States called him on his braggadocio, and we are all paying for the results – especially the American taxpayer.
Saddam Hussein has been tenacious in his pursuit of weapons of mass destruction and, unless he is removed from power, he will eventually harm our nation and our allies. Every moment we delay allows him to grow stronger.
The fact is, our men and women in uniform, the bravest in the world, did everything they could to protect this country from a terror threat and to protect others from the terror threat that was Saddam Hussein. And nobody can deny that we are in a better place because Saddam Hussein is dead.
To sum up, the position we took was that since we didn’t know the internal situation in Iraq nor Saddam Hussein, that our best bet was to take counsel from the people who did know him and who did deal with him.
I did more than anyone else in persuading the U.S. to get rid of Saddam.
If we can kill Saddam, we should.
Back when Saddam Hussein was in power, the Americans didn’t care about his crimes. When he was gassing the Kurds and gassing Iran, they didn’t care about it. When oil was at stake, somehow, suddenly, things mattered.
Saddam’s fate should be in the hands of his country men. They were the major victims of his brutal reign and should decide his life, death, or permanent imprisonment. Personally, I would lock him away forever.
If Bush, as I believe, has reliable information on the fact that Saddam Hussein is making weapons of mass destruction, I cannot not support the policies of his government.
It’s my belief that by demonizing Saddam, by raising the stakes in this war to the point where we’re talking about a great moral crusade, that Bush in fact planted the seeds of discontent in the country, because this was fundamentally a limited war with limited objectives and with limited gains.
Saddam is a familiar dictatorial aggressor, with traditional goals for his aggression.
I have to say when we talk about the treatment of these prisoners that I would guess that these prisoners wake up every morning thanking Allah that Saddam Hussein is not in charge of these prisons.
As far as Saddam Hussein being a great military strategist, he is neither a strategist, nor is he schooled in the operational arts, nor is he a tactician, nor is he a general, nor is he a soldier. Other than that, he’s a great military man, I want you to know that.
We went into Iraq because Saddam Hussein refused to account for his weapons of mass destruction, consistently violated UN resolutions and in a post-9/11 world no American president could afford to give Saddam Hussein the benefit of the doubt.
That was not part of the U.N. resolution; it was not part of the mandate to go on to Baghdad and, frankly, if we had gone into Baghdad and pushed Saddam Hussein off, we would have inherited an even bigger mess than the mess we inherited with the refugee problem.
We are in possession of what I think to be compelling evidence that Saddam Hussein has, and has had for a number of years, a developing capacity for the production and storage of weapons of mass destruction.
The people in Iraq lived essentially good lives. They had brilliant health and education systems. Saddam actually created an incredible infrastructure in a very difficult country, but they were a Mafia family. If you said anything against that regime or that family you would be killed instantly.
In searching for a rationale to go to war, Bush settled on the notion of Saddam as an incarnation of evil, basically, and convinced himself that Saddam was fundamentally Adolf Hitler reborn. I think his feelings towards Saddam were in fact quite genuine and quite legitimately hostile. He was not play acting.
The reason the United States is not so likely to invade Iran is precisely because of the lessons learned from Iraq. And conversely, the Iranian push towards nuclear capability is calculated to deter invasions like the kind deposing Saddam Husain.
I believe that the world is better off without Saddam Hussein. I believe it’s clear that he had every intention to acquire and use weapons of mass destruction. I can only imagine what Saddam Hussein would be doing with the wealth he would acquire with oil at $110 and $120 a barrel.
The capture of Saddam Hussein has proven to the bad ones, to the guilty ones, to the sinful ones that they cannot run forever. Sooner or later, the other criminals will also be found from their hideouts.
