Leadership Quote by John Dingell

“Of course” is doing the dirty work here. John Dingell, a master of congressional plain talk, uses that little phrase to frame a sprawling geopolitical catastrophe as a commonsense oversight - not a tragic unknowable, not a high-minded “unintended consequence,” but an error so obvious it barely deserves debate. The line compresses years of policy into the language of a committee-room correction: we knew better, we didn’t do it, and now we’re living with the bill.

The intent is less to litigate Saddam Hussein’s character than to indict Washington’s appetite for half-measures. Dingell is pointing at the post-Gulf War settlement, when the U.S. stopped short of toppling Saddam in 1991, leaving a dictator boxed in by sanctions, periodically bombed, and still powerful enough to brutalize opponents and destabilize the region. That choice became a political Rorschach test in the 2000s: critics of later intervention could still concede that the earlier endpoint was morally and strategically messy; hawks could weaponize the “unfinished business” narrative.

Subtext: accountability. Dingell isn’t just saying “Saddam was bad.” He’s saying the system that produced the decision - cautious presidents, risk-averse coalitions, a Congress that likes clarity only after the fact - prefers ambiguity until it can’t. The quote’s punch comes from its deceptively mild phrasing. It’s not a drumbeat for war so much as a scathing reminder that America often wants outcomes without owning the means, then acts surprised when history refuses to stay contained “over there.”