(Above: audio from Jesse T. Smith radio interview)

Jesse T. Smith, The Democratic nominee for Congress in Alabama’s 3rd Congressional District hasn’t been able to gain much traction against longtime Republican incumbent Mike Rogers, but he did make national news earlier this month by claiming that the Republican majority in Congress is “worse than ISIL.”

Smith is back again today with more, shall we say, interesting comments.

“Fallujah is now in the Taliban’s hands,” Smith said inaccurately during a local radio interview. “Fallujah was in Saddam Hussein’s hands and Saddam Hussein was not connected to the Taliban. I just say that, I like to make that distinction because… I feel that if we had not gone into Iraq, there’s a lot of things around the world that would not be going on.”

Smith is a U.S. Army veteran who served two tours in Bosnia, two tours in Germany and two combat tours in support of Operation Iraqi Freedom, where he says he was “among one of the first convoys to enter Tikrit Iraq prior to the capture of Saddam Hussein,” so one would think he would be fairly informed on military-related issues.

But in his recent radio interview, Smith was not only inaccurate, he also made some extremely controversial statements about the actions Saddam Hussein took against his own people while he was in power.

“You know that tyrant, that tyrant was needed in that area,” he said in the interview. “Saddam Hussein was known…he would, he would, you know, he was gonna throw some gas on his people. He did that to the Iranians. So, they knew he was a tyrant. Sometimes you have necessary evils and I think for that area he was a necessary evil. And once he was removed, we see what’s going on now.”

What do you think about Smith’s assertion that Hussein’s decision to gas his own people was a “necessary evil”? Let us know in the comment section below or by tweeting @YHN.

(h/t Buzzfeed)

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