Lynn C. Woolsey: “the Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice, appeared on ``Meet the Press'' yesterday morning and made this assertion, and…”

“the Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice, appeared on ``Meet the Press'' yesterday morning and made this assertion, and I quote Dr. Rice: `` . . . when we were attacked on September 11, we had a choice to make. We could decide that the proximate cause was al Qaeda and the people who flew those planes into the buildings and, therefore, we would go after al Qaeda and perhaps after the Taliban and then our work would be done . . . ``Or we could take a bolder approach, which was to say that we had to go after the root causes of the kind of terrorism that was produced there, and that meant a different kind of Middle East. And there is no one who could have imagined a different kind of Middle East with Saddam Hussein still in power.'' Mr. Speaker, what happened to the weapons of mass destruction? In the run up to the war, no one said anything about a bolder approach. We were told about uranium purchases from Niger. We were told about the world's most dangerous weapons falling into the hands of the wrong people. We were told by Dr. Rice herself about the specter of mushroom clouds over American cities. We were treated to a campaign of fear and deception about weapons of mass destruction because the Bush administration knew that was the only way to convince the Nation and the Congress to commit to this war. They knew that this bolder approach, this ideological pipe dream, was an absolute nonstarter.…”