Howard Berman: “I reject the notion that this is under the legal doctrine of preemptive war. We are dealing with a country, Iraq, under…”

“I reject the notion that this is under the legal doctrine of preemptive war. We are dealing with a country, Iraq, under the leadership of Saddam Hussein, that has violated resolution after resolution adopted by the Security Council of the United Nations, including resolutions adopted under Chapter VII, the peacemaking, peace-enforcing provisions of the United Nations charter. To engage in acts to seek to assure compliance with those resolutions and enforcement of those resolutions is not preemptive war in the traditional legal sense of the word; it is the enforcement. I would remind my colleagues in my own party that this body voted on, and 181 of my democratic colleagues supported, the authorization of the use of air strikes to bomb key targets in Yugoslavia in order to stop humanitarian slaughter of Kosovars without a Security Council resolution, after the bombing had already started, and thought, properly so, that we were engaging in the right position for the United States. I would suggest that not only the humanitarian arguments in favor of dealing with Saddam's regime but the national security arguments, which I would suggest are even greater than those that existed when we authorized the use of force against Yugoslavia, compel a very similar conclusion here in the name of enforcing U.N. Security Council resolutions.”