Molly Ivins Quotes

Had the decision belonged to Senator Kerry, Saddam hussein would still be in power today in Iraq. In fact, Saddam Hussein would almost certainly still be in control of Kuwait.

Surely our inaction with respect to Syria is a poor precedent if we're fighting a war on terror.

I have nothing but contempt for Gadhafi. I'm not a Gadhafi supporter in any way. However, it's not clear to me that it's a vital and compelling national security objective of the United States that we ought to use military force to remove him from power. He's not the only unpleasant and unsavory dictator in the world.

On Putin's order, Russia intervenes in Syria not to fight terrorists but to abet the war crimes of the Assad regime. Russian bombers deliberately target aid workers and hospitals. They threaten Syrian freedom fighters trained by the U.S. They are allied with our enemies in the Middle East and trying to weaken our friendships there.

Where are the gains for religious freedom and human rights to justify all the bombings, invasions and wars we have conducted in the lands from Libya to Pakistan - to justify the losses we have endured and the death and suffering we have inflicted?

Hoping to garner the support of the American people, proponents of regime-change wars routinely cite humanitarian concerns to justify military intervention in foreign countries. But here is the reality: As a direct result of our intervention in Iraq and the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, human suffering increased dramatically.

There is no doubt Assad deserves every missile we fire at him, but there's one big problem with air strikes - there is absolutely no proof it has any deterrent effect on Assad. To the contrary, history tells us these strikes will most likely quicken the pace of his assault on his own people.

While Syrian President Bashar al-Assad is a brutal dictator and should be tried at the Hague for international war crimes, the United States should not militarily overthrow him.

No one wants to abandon the Israelis. But I think the perception is, and I think it's probably an accurate perception, that the tail is leading the dog - that we are giving the Israelis carte blanche ability to exercise whatever they want to do in their area.

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.

Saddam Hussein was a horrible man, and I am pleased he is no longer running Iraq. But the war was wrong.

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.

If we can kill Saddam, we should.

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

I hope the example of Saddam Hussein will give a lesson to leaders of other countries where human rights are not respected.

You have no right to criticise Russia over Chechnya.

The international community unfortunately did take sides in Libya, and we would never allow the Security Council to authorise anything similar to what happened in Libya.

If it was up to the U.N., Saddam Hussein would still be killing his own people.

The Second World War is and was constantly being drudged up by Blair and Bush to rationalize the invasion of Iraq.

I think the rule should be that if we're going to take actions overseas that result in the deaths of people, the United States should take responsibility for that.

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.

It was not in our interest to enter Iraq in the first place.

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.

Well, what I've said is that the war in Iraq will always be clouded by how it began, which was a wrong premise, that there were in fact no weapons of nuclear - weapons of mass destruction.

It [the Vietnam War] is worse than immoral. It's a mistake.