A Quote by John F. Kerry
I will be voting to give the President of the United States the authority to use force-- if necessary-- to disarm Saddam Hussein because I believe that a deadly arsenal of weapons of mass destruction in his hands is a real and grave threat to our security.
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Without question, we need to disarm Saddam Hussein. He is a brutal, murderous dictator, leading an oppressive regime ... He presents a particularly grievous threat because he is so consistently prone to miscalculation ... And now he is miscalculating America's response to his continued deceit and his consistent grasp for weapons of mass destruction ... So the threat of Saddam Hussein with weapons of mass destruction is real.
I come to this debate, Mr. Speaker, as one at the end of 10 years in office on the Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, where stopping the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction was one of my top priorities. I applaud the President on focusing on this issue and on taking the lead to disarm Saddam Hussein... Others have talked about this threat that is posed by Saddam Hussein. Yes, he has chemical weapons, he has biological weapons, he is trying to get nuclear weapons.
There is no question that Iraq possesses biological and chemical weapons and that he [Saddam Hussein] seeks to acquire additional weapons of mass destruction, including nuclear weapons. That is not in debate. I also agree with President Bush that Saddam Hussein is a threat to peace and must be disarmed, to quote President Bush directly.
We went into Iraq because Saddam Hussein refused to account for his weapons of mass destruction, consistently violated UN resolutions and in a post-9/11 world no American president could afford to give Saddam Hussein the benefit of the doubt.
America has shown we are serious about removing the threat of weapons of mass destruction... We now know that Saddam Hussein had the capacity to produce weapons of mass destruction.... We know he had the necessary infrastructure because we found the labs and the dual-use facilities that could be used for these chemical and biological agents. We know that he was developing the delivery systems - ballistic missiles - that had been prohibited by the United Nations.
Our President feels, and apparently many in the United Nations Security Council feel, that it is necessary to disarm Iraq before Iraq can again use weapons of mass destruction on her neighbors or she makes some liaison with terrorists who will use these weapons either against Iraq's neighbors or ourselves.
The threat from Saddam Hussein and weapons of mass destruction - chemical, biological, potentially nuclear weapons capability - that threat is real.
The threat of Saddam Hussein with weapons of mass destruction is real, but as I said, it is not new. It has been with us since the end of that war, and particularly in the last 4 years we know after Operation Desert Fox failed to force him to reaccept them, that he has continued to build those weapons. He has had a free hand for 4 years to reconstitute these weapons, allowing the world, during the interval, to lose the focus we had on weapons of mass destruction and the issue of proliferation.
So the threat of Saddam Hussein with weapons of mass destruction is real.
It was President [Bill] Clinton and the United States congress in 1998 which said that the regime has to be changed because the regime would not give up its weapons of mass destruction. We came into office in 2001 and kept that policy because Saddam Hussein had not changed.
Saddam Hussein is a risk-taking aggressor who has attacked four countries, used chemical weapons against his own people, professed a desire to harm the United States and its allies, and, even faced with the prospect of his regime's imminent destruction, has still refused to abide by Security Council demands that he disarm.
We believe, as the President has indicated, that this combination of a rogue state that possesses weapons of mass destruction and has known ties to terrorist organizations, is a grave threat to the people of the United States and to other countries around the world.
Hawks favor war on the grounds that Saddam Hussein is reckless, tyrannical and instinctively aggressive, and that if he comes into possession of nuclear weapons in addition to the weapons of mass destruction he already has, he is likely to use them or share them with terrorists. The threat of mass death on a scale never before seen residing in the hands of an unstable madman is intolerable – and must be preempted.
But I want to just caution, it is not incumbent on the United States to prove that Saddam Hussein is trying to acquire weapons of mass destruction. He's already demonstrated that he's trying to acquire weapons of mass destruction.
Saddam Hussein's regime is despicable, he is developing weapons of mass destruction, and we cannot leave him doing so unchecked. He is a threat to his own people and to the region and, if allowed to develop these weapons, a threat to us also.
Imagine the consequences if Saddam fails to comply and we fail to act. Saddam will be emboldened, believing the international community has lost its will. He will rebuild his arsenal of weapons of mass destruction. And some day, some way, I am certain, he will use that arsenal again, as he has ten times since 1983.
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