Christopher Shays: “I am motivated to come because of the comments made by the previous speaker, by an incident that happened today in my…”

“I am motivated to come because of the comments made by the previous speaker, by an incident that happened today in my committee, and listening on TV to a previous speaker on Iraq. All three of them, to the best of my knowledge, have not been to Iraq since the war, and yet, they profess to know so much about what is going on in Iraq. I have not quite understood why our colleague would go and meet with Saddam Hussein before the war and not seek to understand and meet with our people in Iraq and the Iraqis after the war. I voted to remove Iraq out of Kuwait in 1991 because I believed we could not allow Iraq, and Saddam Hussein in particular, to control 19 percent of the world's oil, the 10 percent that was in Iraq and the 9 percent in Kuwait, and then threaten over 40 percent of the world's oil in Saudi Arabia, the Arab Emirate, Qatar and even Iran. So even more than 40 percent. It is almost like a James Bond movie that we would somehow think that we would want that to happen. People say it is all about oil. No. It is about our being able to light a room, heat a room, provide power in a hospital, to be able to move. Basically, it is about our lifeblood. So we went in and removed Saddam, and we had an agreement, which he did not abide with for 12 years. In fact, we encircled Iraq, hoping, I guess, that he would eventually comply. {time} 2145 We had inspections that we sought to have him comply to, and he did not.…”