Rumsfeld: Saddam is a butcher
Launching a series of speeches across America to spread the Bush administration’s anti-Iraq message, Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld today called Saddam a brutal dictator and said Iraq would be better off without him.
“He is a butcher, he tortures people, kills them personally,” Rumsfeld said in Atlanta, Georgia. “He has kept billions and billions and billions of dollars from going to the people of that country because he is determined to have weapons of mass destruction.”
Rumsfeld insisted that he hadn’t come with “any particular message,” saying he just wanted to take the debate on Iraq outside Washington.
Aides said the interviews and speeches in Atlanta represented the first of a series of trips Rumsfeld would be making to do that.
Asked how the administration would assure that the next Iraqi government was not worse than Saddam, Rumsfeld said: “In life, there are very few assurances.”
“It has to be the interest of the world to see that his sons ... don’t succeed him,” as well as anyone else from Saddam’s ruling clique, he said.
