Donald Rumsfeld Quotes

I think they got it wrong with Saddam Hussein. They thought he had the A-Bomb. Instead he had a bomb.

I think it was the right decision to disarm Saddam Hussein. And when the president made the decision, I supported him, and I support the fact that we did disarm him.

I still believe to some degree that Iraq had WMD.

I don't believe anyone that I know in the administration ever said that Iraq had nuclear weapons.

We have known for many years that Saddam Hussein is seeking and developing weapons of mass destruction.

I feel relieved that we discovered that Iraq did not have nuclear weapons.

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.

What we said publicly is that we know that Saddam Hussein has chemical weapons, he's used them; we know about his biological weapons programs; and in the nuclear equation, left to his own devices, with no fissile material, by the end of the decade, he'll have a nuclear weapon. But if fissile material is provided to Saddam Hussein, he'll have a nuclear weapon within a year, so I'd say the year is the outside timetable.

Would the Iraq War have occurred without WMD? I doubt it.

The peace movement didn't stop the Iraq but I think that Blair would not be able to go along and support an Iranian war.

So has the strategic decision been made to disarm Iraq of its weapons of mass destruction by the leadership in Baghdad? I think our judgment has to be clearly not.

I will be voting to give the President of the United States the authority to use force-- if necessary-- to disarm Saddam Hussein because I believe that a deadly arsenal of weapons of mass destruction in his hands is a real and grave threat to our security.

Saddam was a threat, that the threat had to be dealt with.

I think the entire world knows, and North Korea knows, that if they used any weapons on our soldiers they would be obliterated. And it would be an overwhelming response.

I think the burden is on those people who think he didn't have weapons of mass destruction to tell the world where they are.

I don't know what our capabilities are. If I were there, I think it would be nutty to do that. The only country on Earth more containable than Iran is Iraq. And we've certainly made a mistake there. We could have continued Saddam.

The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.

The administration took care of a source of instability in Iraq. Envision a world in which Saddam Hussein was rushing for a nuclear weapon to compete against Iran. My decision to remove Saddam Hussein was the correct decision in my judgment. We didn't find the weapons we thought we would find or the weapons everybody thought he had. But he was a significant source of instability.

Undoubtedly the war with Iraq was a tragedy. I think it was also a crime.

What I did warn about when I testified in front of Congress in 2002, I said if you want to worry about a state, it shouldn't be Iraq, it should be Iran. But this government, our administration, wanted to worry about Iraq, not Iran.

It's true that the question of Iraq divided Europe.

It bothers me to read the comments of leaders of the Hamas and others who hate America that their goal is to have more weaponry capable of delivering all types of weapons of mass destruction.

It is beyond dispute that Saddam Hussein is a menace.

It has been rumored that we have fired scud missiles into Kuwait. I am here now to tell you, we do not have any scud missiles and I don't know why they were fired into Kuwait.

A lot of folks are still demanding more evidence before they actually consider Iraq a threat. For example, France wants more evidence. And you know I'm thinking, the last time France wanted more evidence they rolled right through Paris with the German flag.