Hussein Quotations

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.

Throughout our courtship, Kenny told me that he had proof that Saddam Hussein was a threat because he possessed weapons of mass destruction. I told him, 'You had me at weapons.'

In the 1990s, we were certain that Saddam Hussein had a nuclear arsenal. In fact, his factories could barely make soap.

There's a certain amount of sympathy here for the Bush administration's problem, which is they would like to get rid of Saddam Hussein and they would like to have the Kurds autonomous.

Colin Powell has said over the years that Saddam Hussein is like a toothache. It recurs from time to time, and you just have to live with it. At other times, he's compared Saddam Hussein to a kidney stone that will eventually pass. But he has never said, 'You have to operate and take out the kidney stone.'

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 Hussein has systematically violated, over the course of the past 11 years, every significant UN resolution that has demanded that he disarm and destroy his chemical and biological weapons, and any nuclear capacity. This he has refused to do.

The purpose of the UN mechanism, this inspection mechanism, is not to engage in a cat and mouse game with Saddam Hussein and try to find weapons that the Iraqi government is working on concealing.

When Americans invade Iraq, Bush says, we will be greeted as liberators by the Iraqi people, proving that taking out Saddam Hussein was the right thing to do.

I don't know if, at the end of the day, how brave Saddam Hussein would be if he were stripped of his bodyguards and everything else.

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.

Even before September 11, there was a debate in the administration about whether or not military force should be used to oust Saddam Hussein. You're not going to find one person in the top echelons of the foreign policy and national security establishment in the U.S. government who's going to say that Saddam Hussein should not be out of power.

It was, however, in the interest of Osama bin Laden for us to destroy a secular Arab leader; it was very much in the interest of the Iranians because they wanted revenge against Saddam Hussein for Iraq's invasion in 1980.

Yes, more than 100 Democrats voted to authorize Bush to take the nation to war. Most of them did so in the belief that the president and his administration were truthful in their statements that Saddam Hussein was a gathering menace.

In liberating Iraq, we have rid the nation and the rest of the world from the danger of Saddam Hussein.

All around the world one heard or read that there was no connection between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda.

As someone who has seen war first hand, and as a father of three young adults, it was my hope that we could have resolved this conflict and disarmed Saddam Hussein without war. However, this was not the case.

It was known in the mid 90s already that Saddam Hussein was a dangerous tyrant that he had already launched aggressions against Iran, he had invaded Kuwait.

Let's be clear: Neither Secretary Powell or I opposed the notion of removing Saddam Hussein by force, but we wanted to avoid the war if we could. But if we couldn't, the notion of removing Saddam Hussein from the scene seemed eminently sensible, given that you had, what, 16 or so U.N. Security Council resolutions basically saying the same thing.

The defense of the West Bank by Arab forces would be a truly suicidal enterprise. The late King Hussein understood these facts well. Until 1967, he was careful to keep most of his forces east of the Jordan River. When he momentarily forgot these realities in 1967, it took Israel just three days of fighting to remind him of them.

Saddam Hussein wrote the book on human rights violations.

Iraqi national identity under Saddam Hussein never truly incorporated Shiites or Kurds. Sunnis, who identified most closely with the Iraqi nation, remain in some ways disenfranchised relative to the other groups, or at least they perceive themselves that way.

Whatever one wants to say about the conduct of the Iraq War, going to war to remove Saddam Hussein in 2003 was a necessary act. It should and could have been done earlier, had not the Clinton White House, which understood the need, not wasted the opportunity through timidity and bluster.

The world is a better place with Saddam Hussein gone.

In his final year in office, Clinton decided that his contribution to Middle East peace would lie not in the removal of Saddam Hussein but in a grand attempt to resolve the conflict between the Palestinians and Israel. With this, he missed his last chance to deal forcefully with the man he was publicly committed to overthrowing.

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 can't do anything too serious like Saddam Hussein, but I would like to do Bill Clinton. That'd be fun.

George W. Bush and Tony Blair had to convince the world that Saddam Hussein represented an imminent threat. Tony Blair lied when he claimed that Iraq could launch a chemical or biological attack within 45 minutes.

Saddam Hussein was fascinated by ancient Babylon and Assyria. He made money available to protect and develop the great archaeological sites. The great achievements of Mesopotamian civilisation were pressed into the service of the Ba'athist regime.

It is beyond dispute that Saddam Hussein is a menace.

The president welcomes peaceful protests - it is a time-honored tradition. The president agrees violence is not the answer in Iraq, and that's why he hopes Saddam Hussein will disarm.

I try to read everything that I can about myself because Saddam Hussein didn't read his reviews and he thought he was winning!

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.

To avoid a military conflict, Saddam Hussein has no other choice than to leave the country.

I don't think there was enough skepticism because I think most of us kind of believed that Saddam Hussein was building biological, chemical, and perhaps even, nuclear weapons.

There are many countries who have traditionally sponsored terrorism. Iraq is one, though it appears the majority of the terrorism committed by Saddam Hussein is on his own citizens. Iran in this regard. Syria, with their close support of Hezbollah, is noteworthy in this respect.

I say at this point, for different reasons, Bush and Hussein are both very threatening to world peace and to deny that is to be incredibly naive.

I was an opponent of Saddam Hussein when the British and American governments and businessmen were selling him guns and gas.

More coming out about Saddam Hussein. We now know he takes Viagra and he has as many as six mistresses. No wonder Congress is reluctant to take action against this guy - he's one of their own.

If you catch him, just give me four seconds with Saddam Hussein.

It is high time that the international community tell Saddam Hussein and his regime that this is not an issue of negotiation with the U.N. about obligations that they undertook in 1991.

I may find Saddam Hussein's regime abhorrent - any normal person would - but the survival of it is in his hands.

In time it will become clear to everyone that support for the policies of pre-emptive war and interventionist nation-building will have much greater significance than the removal of Saddam Hussein itself.

As soon as, say, Saddam Hussein started bombing Israel with Scuds, everyone was like, 'Poor Israel.' But when Israel retaliates - and most of the time they then win - people turn against them.

Saddam Hussein was not an Islamist. He's not a radical jihadist. He's not a radical Muslim. I mean, he was a - he was a Baathist. He was a secular - even though he professed to be a good and devout Muslim.

We have defeated Saddam Hussein and Iraq. The good news is Iraq is ours, and the bad news is Iraq is ours.

Saddam Hussein has been brutal against his people, but when he was committing those crimes, the international community did not come to the rescue of the Iraqis.

There were no weapons of mass destruction and Saddam Hussein was not involved in the September 11th attack.

I just think everything we do has an unintended consequence. We take out Saddam Hussein in Iraq, and Iraq was the check against Iran.

If the Americans go in and overthrow Saddam Hussein and it's clean, he has nothing, I will apologize to the nation, and I will not trust the Bush administration again.

In Ghazalia, Mr. Hussein showed his contempt for the majority Shiites in ways large and small. He refused to allow them even one mosque, while the Sunnis had nearly a dozen. To worship, the Shiites had to cross an inconveniently located bridge over the sewage canal to Shula.

Saddam Hussein is a homicidal dictator who is addicted to weapons of mass destruction.

Whether weapons exist in Iraq, Saddam Hussein or post-Saddam Hussein, it is a serious enough issue that require that we continue to go and make sure that Iraq does not have weapons.

Al Qaeda is still a threat. We cannot pretend somehow that because Barack Hussein Obama got elected as president, suddenly everything is going to be OK.

Mr. Hussein began building Ghazalia in the early 1980s as a home for army officers and other members of his Baath Party. Concrete mansions with pillars and domes are common in the southern half of the district.

America was cool with Saddam Hussein when he was killing Iranians.

We believe that's the best opportunity we have to get Saddam Hussein to disarm.

We're not going to lose any sleep if Saddam Hussein suddenly isn't their leader, from whatever reason. No tears will be shed.

What the tapes show is that between the first gulf war and the second gulf war, Saddam Hussein had not lost his appetite for, or interest in, weapons of mass destruction. To the contrary, he was almost obsessed by them.

Saddam Hussein is Hitler like Oasis was The Beatles.

I would wager that the number of civilians that were killed [in] a typical week under Saddam Hussein was probably more than we killed during the weeks we were at war there.

As the president has said, if the United Nations will not disarm Saddam Hussein, it will be another international organization, a coalition of the willing that will be made up of numerous nations that will disarm Saddam Hussein.

Given the chance to throw off a brutal dictator like Saddam Hussein, people will rejoice.

Saddam Hussein is about to face trial and George Bush wants to execute him. Not because of the war crimes, but because Saddam is beating him in the polls.

We are going to keep Saddam Hussein guessing. He'll just have to wonder what the United States has in store for him.

There are some signs that in recent weeks Saddam Hussein has been concentrating more on defensive measures rather than offensive measures.

the opaque nature of that Saddam Hussein regime.

The fact that Iraq is exporting nursing supplies (in exchange) for hard currency, in violation of sanctions, while babies and children are suffering from malnutrition is yet another indication of the Iraqi regime's cynical disregard for the welfare of its own citizens, ... and further proof that the responsibility of the suffering of the Iraqi children lies with Saddam Hussein -- and not sanctions.

The fact is, I was not sent out to question what British intelligence might have, I was sent out to question the allegation that Saddam Hussein had attempted to purchase several hundred tons of uranium oxide from Niger.

The reality is, it will be a significant conflict going for many, many months, if not longer. Saddam Hussein is not a fool. He hasn't been sitting there waiting to get shot for 13 years.

There is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction.

There is no doubt in my mind that Saddam Hussein is a problem. ... He has the capability of producing weapons of mass destruction and the willingness to use them. We know that he has breached several U.N. declarations.

We have, in fact, gained because Saddam Hussein has reversed his course

Here is the truth: The Earth is round; Saddam Hussein did not attack us on 9/11; Elvis is dead; Obama was born in the United States; and the climate crisis is real.

Seventy-seven senators from both sides of the aisle, the previous administration and foreign governments all believed, based on the same intelligence, that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction and posed an enormous threat,

Since the ousting and capture of Saddam Hussein by U.S. forces, civil rights and personal freedoms have been restored in Iraq, as well as equal rights to all, not just to Saddam's entourage of terrorists.

meets the U.N. inspection demands, okay. A diplomatic settlement is always preferable to a military air strike, even though Saddam Hussein has carried us to the brink of war, inflicted a lot of psychological damage and a lot of money costs. If the fine print measures up, we'll take a close look at it.

One meeting does not make a conspiracy. Saddam Hussein does not engage in these types of acts.

No political decision to eliminate Saddam Hussein has been taken and the judiciary is independent.

Nuclear deterrence doesn't work outside of the Russian - U.S. context; Saddam Hussein showed that.

People who are willing to risk their lives need to know the truth, ... They need to understand that they are there based on decisions that were made in good faith, by responsible people, and that this world is going to be a lot better off with Saddam Hussein gone and with that country on a path toward democracy.

politicians who actually voted in favor of authorizing the use of force against Saddam Hussein .

Only, only, when Saddam Hussein does not comply with both the inspections and the consequences of the inspections ... then there can be reason for a military intervention,

I would question what joy one can derive from being a strongman in a weak country, as Saddam Hussein is,

I don't apologize for that, and I'm not sorry that Saddam Hussein is gone,

I can accept that Saddam Hussein is a terrible dictator, but it is not the objective of the U.N. to get rid of him. The objective and the goal is to get rid of the weapons of mass destruction,

I believe we could have removed Saddam Hussein from power without bombing the children of Baghdad.

But that's going to be a little difficult because Saddam Hussein has a reputation for not putting anything in writing because he wanted to avoid this very thing.

I have a lot of different pins ... and it all kind of started as a joke, ... I do like jewelry, but when Saddam Hussein called me a snake, I happened to have a snake pin. And I was doing an interview, actually with CNN, and your cameras picked up that I had on a snake pin, and I was asked why and I said, 'because Saddam Hussein has just called me a snake.'

I have met Scott Ritter before and I think he's an idealist. I think he wants to believe that everybody's good and the world's going to be safe. But I don't believe there's any real credence to his statements. It looks to me like he's over there courting Saddam Hussein at the wrong time at the wrong place.

I have met Saddam Hussein exactly the same number of times as Donald Rumsfeld met him. The difference is that Donald Rumsfeld met him to sell him guns and to give him maps the better to target those guns.

I feel the pain that you are feeling, ... It is impossible to say that the plight of women was better under Saddam Hussein . Women were tortured, they had their children tortured in front of them.

I can't psychoanalyze why (Iraqi President) Saddam Hussein does what he does, but I can tell you this. It's smart for him to stop attacking our planes because he was losing a lot of equipment. He was losing radars. He was losing missiles. And he was losing air defense guns. And he was losing command and control facilities. So, if he wants to hold on to his equipment, he should stop attacking the patrols.

Given that kind of background, I would be a little bit surprised if it was Saddam Hussein who directed this, ... But, on the other hand, I would also be somewhat surprised if there were no connection at all between Saddam and al Qaeda.

From the start, we were building the case against Hussein and looking at how we could take him out and change Iraq into a new country. And, if we did that, it would solve everything. It was about finding a way to do it. That was the tone of it -- the president saying, 'Fine. Go find me a way to do this.'

If we allow that to happen, then in essence we'll be doing the same thing we accused Saddam Hussein of doing. We'll just be substituting one tyranny for another.

He'd like to see Saddam come clean and disarm, bring those weapons of mass destruction to a parking lot and allow them to be destroyed, ... He'd like to see a regime change in Iraq, so the Iraqi people can live in freedom and have more liberties -- and Saddam Hussein can still do that. The burden is on Saddam Hussein.

We take every effort to avoid civilian casualties, but (Iraqi President) Saddam Hussein has to take a lot of the blame as long as he continues to violate the no-fly zones and attack our aircraft,

We are finding new mass graves every day. Saddam Hussein committed a crime by using chemical weapons... He waged two wars on Iran and Kuwait. He murdered and executed hundreds and hundreds of Iraqis.

The range of views now include a unified consensus that the failures are Iraq's, that the consequences are Iraq's and that the international community believes that Saddam Hussein is failing to comply with his required obligations.