Comment & Debate
Donald Rumsfeld said to NPR’s Steve Inskeep in a February 2011 interview: “And a vicious, truly vicious regime that was shooting at our aircraft every day, more than 2,000 times when we were patrolling the northern and southern no-fly zones for the United Nations, that regime is gone, and the region is safer, our country is safer, and the world’s a better place without Saddam Hussein.”[1]
On CBS News’ Face the Nation in 2008, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said: “Well, first of all, the overthrow of Saddam Hussein is very important and better for the world,” she told Bob Schieffer. “One cannot imagine a Middle East that would be different and would not be a place in which extremism thrives without Saddam Hussein’s removal and the chance for a different kind of Iraq.”[2]
Sen. Joe Lieberman, a former Connecticut Democrat who won re-election as an independent on a pro-Iraq war platform: “We are significantly safer as a result of what I consider to be a victory in Iraq. It cost too much; it went on too long; mistakes were made along the way. But ultimately, if we had withdrawn, it would have had a devastating impact on the entire Middle East and our credibility in the world.”[3]
Max Boot, a military scholar and senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations: “we know that years of effort have toppled one of the world’s most dangerous and unpredictable dictators and prevented a terrible defeat that would have occurred if al-Qaeda in Iraq and its Shiite counterparts had succeeded in chasing us out prematurely.”[4]