Wit & Attitude Quote by John Hewson

Strip away the policy-speak and you can hear the blunt corrective: stop treating Saddam Hussein like a cardboard villain who will collapse on cue. John Hewson’s line works because it punctures a popular wartime fantasy - that overwhelming force automatically produces a quick, tidy ending. By insisting the conflict will drag on “many, many months,” he’s not just forecasting timelines; he’s challenging the political marketing of war as a short-term project with clean deliverables.

The second sentence does the sharper work. “Saddam Hussein is not a fool” isn’t admiration, it’s a rebuke to complacency. Hewson frames Hussein as adaptive, patient, and strategically self-preserving: a man who has survived sanctions, diplomacy, and periodic bombing without being dislodged. The image of “waiting to get shot” is intentionally crude, almost cinematic, because it targets the public’s appetite for a decisive execution scene. Hewson is warning that real adversaries don’t cooperate with narrative arcs.

Subtextually, this is also about domestic politics: leaders sell wars by selling certainty. Hewson pushes back against that certainty, reminding listeners that regime change is not a switch you flip but a chaotic process that invites insurgency, misdirection, and prolonged occupation. The context is a post-Gulf War decade where Hussein’s durability had already embarrassed confident predictions. Hewson’s intent is to inject realism - and, by doing so, to make overconfident advocates of intervention own the long tail of consequences they’d rather keep off the poster.