Condoleezza: Saddam Was a Threat

Saddam Hussein “was a threat” to the US, Condoleezza Rice told Lawrence O’Donnell on MSNBC last night. While O’Donnell held that “Iraq had nothing to do with September 11th,” The former secretary of state argued that “after September 11th, of course you look at threats differently. Your country has just been attacked; you know that you cannot allow threats to materialize.” Saddam, she said, had been a threat “since he invaded Iran in the late 1980s,” reports the Huffington Post.

“With or without mature weapons of mass destruction, he was a threat,” Rice said. Among his crimes were “shooting at our aircraft in the no-fly zone” and “trying to reconstitute his weapons of mass destruction.” But, O’Donnell asked, could the Iraqi people have risen against Saddam as in the recent Middle East protests? “It's simply ill-informed and ahistorical to suggest that a dictator as brutal as Saddam Hussein would have allowed an Arab uprising in his country,” Rice said. Click through for more from the Condoleezza Rice interview. (More Condoleezza Rice stories.)