Ron DeSantis sees the brighter side of Saddam Hussein

Florida’s Governor is offering a reconsideration of a former long time dictator of Iraq who is estimated to have killed at least 250,000 of his own people, nearly 20 years to the day after the U.S. captured him.

Ron DeSantis told supporters in New Hampshire that in one sense, things in the country dealing with American military intervention since the 1990s was better under brutal strongman Saddam Hussein.

In Windham Friday, DeSantis said that “since the Cold War ended American foreign policy has largely failed,” noting his own personal sacrifice on the pyre of Washington’s approach to international affairs.

“And I was a part of one of these wars in Iraq where you get in and there’s no concrete victory achieved. It’s just kind of ‘OK, you’re there, we are supposed to create a democracy in Iraq,'” DeSantis recounted.

“What do they have now? It’s an Iranian controlled government effectively in Iraq. How is that in America’s interest? I mean, Saddam was a bad guy but he hated the Iranians,” DeSantis added. “And so we’ve now put one of our mortal enemies effectively in charge of Iraq where they didn’t used to have that control over Iraq before.”

The Governor denounced t”he same people that have been driving this train for a decade and they’ve never succeeded in any of these conflicts,” advocating “more of a Reagan view where the way you achieve peace is through strength, but it’s not through trying to just do these interventions where we don’t have a good sense of what we’re trying to achieve.”

The Governor made the comments at an event sponsored by the Never Back Down super PAC.

DeSantis has cast doubt on the wisdom of the Iraqi invasion before.

“So these are people that were thinking, you know, you can overthrow somebody and impose an American style democracy in the Middle East. I can tell you when you’re on the ground there for like 48 hours, you realize that was not in the cards,” DeSantis said earlier this month in Prosperity, South Carolina.

He described the Iraqi government as “basically a client of the Iranians” on that occasion also.

DeSantis was in Iraq in 2007, serving as a legal advisor.