Jon Kyl: “let me summarize what I think has been established during the last couple of hours. The reason we took to the floor is…”

“let me summarize what I think has been established during the last couple of hours. The reason we took to the floor is because there has been a lot of criticism of the President of the United States and the administration for its actions in finally deciding that enough was enough with Saddam Hussein, that his continual violation of the U.N. resolutions had to be enforced by someone, and that before there was an imminent threat posed by his dangerous regime, it was important for the United States and a coalition of other countries to take action to remove him. The criticism has come both from potential Democratic nominees for President, Members of this body, news organizations, and others outside the body, but we sought to try to put into perspective some of these criticisms and to point out that at the end of the day, there should be no question that President Bush did the right thing. The three key points were, first, that an intelligence failure is not the same thing as intelligence misuse or misleading, and if there was a failure because the intelligence agencies were wrong about the stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction that they thought existed and which we have not been able to find, it is not the same thing as saying that the President misled anyone or that anyone else with access to intelligence misled anyone.”