Time & Perspective Quote by Jose Ramos-Horta

A politician’s favorite sleight of hand is to smuggle a conclusion past the audience under cover of moral bookkeeping. Ramos-Horta does it cleanly: “notwithstanding the violence” is a verbal sandbag meant to hold back the flood of images that were already defining Iraq in real time. He concedes the blood, then cordons it off as “at the moment,” a phrase that shrinks catastrophe into a temporary weather system. What matters, he insists, is the ledger entry that can’t be disputed: Saddam’s regime was “hideous,” and its rap sheet is stacked with the unanswerable nouns of modern evil - genocide, chemical and biological weapons, aggression.

The intent is not to describe Iraq so much as to set the terms of evaluation. By anchoring judgment in regime removal “in itself,” he separates means from ends and invites a moral argument that treats the toppling of a dictator as a stand-alone good, insulated from the messy afterlife of invasion. That insulation is the subtext: history may be chaotic, but the headline can still be righteous.

Context matters because Ramos-Horta is speaking as a postcolonial statesman whose own national story (East Timor) is built on the promise that ending repression is worth upheaval. That biography lends credibility - and also reveals the risk. The quote reaches for a humanitarian justification that can travel easily in Western debates, while quietly asking listeners to accept violence as transitional “cost,” rather than as a political consequence that should revise the verdict.