Lynn C. Woolsey: “As this House, our Nation and the world debate the quality of the intelligence that the war in Iraq was fought over, it…”

“As this House, our Nation and the world debate the quality of the intelligence that the war in Iraq was fought over, it is too easy to forget that our troops were not the first to search the Iraqi desert for weapons of mass destruction. United Nations inspectors spent a decade searching for and destroying illegal Iraqi weapons facilities, but in the days and months leading up to the war, they were scorned for their failure to find weapons of mass destruction. This resolution calls on the GAO to investigate how much cooperation the United States intelligence agencies gave United Nations inspectors. Understanding about that cooperation with the United Nations, or lack thereof, will give us a better picture of the efforts this Nation took to avoid war with Iraq. If America did not fully share its intelligence with U.N. inspectors, Congress needs to find out why. The fact is that the rhetoric leading up to the war in Iraq led many Americans to believe that finding weapons of mass destruction would be absolutely easy, that the U.N. inspectors must have been grossly incompetent. But I do not believe that to be true and I think that our inability to find weapons of mass destruction now requires the United States to reexamine the rhetoric and the events that led up to the war.”