Jake Tapper Quotes

That a pressing need exists for an International Criminal Court is an unhappy reflection on the tragic realities of the world today.

The U.N. fiddled while Saddam slaughtered.

Syria cannot continue this way—killing their people

It is time for all civilized nations to stop the horrors that are taking place in Syria and demand a political solution.

I don't think anyone would disagree with the conclusion that Saddam [Hussein] was a terrible dictator. He had gassed his own people and his neighbors. He had killed thousands of people, and he had started a couple of wars and destroyed his country.

How long do Syrian families have to live in fear that their children will be killed or tortured, before the Security Council will act? How many people need to die before the consciences of world capitals are stirred?

Abu Ghraib, as bad as it was, can't be compared to what Saddam was doing to people.

Saddam Hussein, influenced by fascism, ordered the deaths of tens of thousands of people, fought two disastrous wars, turned his nation into an international pariah and ruined his country’s economy. In other words, his record is identical to George W. Bush’s.

Our troops are in Burundi. We were requested by African countries who said, look, the United Nations is not moving on this matter, can you people deploy people, so we can move Burundi forward.

The people of Aleppo have suffered like no one else for so long. There has to be a political solution.

We are ready to cooperate in any way to achieve stability in Syria, of course taking into consideration the interest of the country, and the will of the Syrian people.

[Bashar] Assad has made a series of choices ever since then that is literally destroying his country.

A political solution is going to involve neighboring countries... You will have to bring people together to agree on a political process. If that includes supporting a military exercise of some sort without sending troops, that is on the table, as long as this is not the only option that people look at.

How a man who holds the entire population of a country as his prisoners, and punishes the families of those who escape, can be admired by people who call themselves liberals is one of the many wonders of the human mind's ability to rationalize. Yet such is the case with Fidel Castro.

We've seen the reality of Saddam's regime: his thugs prepared to kill their own people, the parading of prisoners of war and now the release of those pictures of executed British soldiers.

American national security and American economic interests, of course - every president, every secretary of state - that is the primary goal. As you are in this job and in the work, you begin to see, though, that in the long run, both American economic interests and American national security are better served when there are other decent countries in the world who are both your allies and even when your adversaries are acting more decently.

People talk about [Bashar] Assad running Syria. He doesn't control his own country. He's down to about 20, 25 percent of the country. What is this fiction that he is somehow the only person who can save Syria? There's - with Assad there, there is no Syria. So that's what the Iranians and the Russians need to really begin to focus in on.

I have long believed that the only way peace can be achieved is through world government.

Assad is not going away, but we're not going to stop beating up on him. We're not going to stop saying that the way he treats the people in Syria is wrong, that he has actually killed his own people and America will never stand for that.

Let's recall Bosnia in 1995. As we know well, the European peacekeeping contingent, represented by the Dutch troops, did not want to get involved with one of the attacking sides, and allowed it to destroy a whole village. Hundreds of people were killed or injured. The tragedy in Srebrenica is well known in Europe.

The first step in the direction of a world rule of law is the recognition that peace no longer is an unobtainable ideal but a necessary condition of continued human existence. But to take even this step we must return to a calm and responsible frame of mind in which we can face the long patient tasks ahead.

The president, who finds so much to complain about in other areas of the world, apparently saw nothing wrong in recognizing a Communist regime that has killed more people in its short history of control over the teeming millions of that great country than any other collection of dictators or tyrants in the history of the world.

Saddam Hussein greeted me with a handshake, which, again to my surprise, is surprisingly soft considering how many people that hand had dispatched, allegedly. I think he's quite a forbidding presence, too forbidding a presence to be charming. But he's interesting.

Syria is bad enough, it's a pretty terrible atrocity. But there are much worse ones in the world. So for example, the worst atrocities in the past decade have been in the Congo, the Eastern Congo, where maybe 5 million people have been killed.

I don't regret at all saying that if I saw Bashar al-Assad using chemical weapons on his people that that would change my assessments in terms of what we were or were not willing to do in Syria.