Marty Walsh: “the decision before the Congress this week is whether or not to give the President the option to use force with Iraq if…”

“the decision before the Congress this week is whether or not to give the President the option to use force with Iraq if all else fails. It is similar to the one before the Congress early in my career when the elder Bush was in the White House. The main difference was that Iraq had invaded a sovereign nation, Kuwait, to the outrage of the world community. The world agreed that Iraq was the aggressor and must be driven out. The U.N. voted for precisely that and we led the effort. Although much clearer in circumstance, it was an extremely difficult decision. Today things are not quite so clear. There has been no invasion and there, at least at the moment of this writing, is no U.N. sanction for military action. The arguments are more like piling straws on a camel's back. Saddam Hussein is a murderer of his own people. He is a warmonger, witness Kuwait, Iran and the Kurds in his own country. He aggressively pursues the development of nuclear weapons. Remember Israel bombed an Iraqi nuclear facility many years ago. Hussein still pursues that goal. He has accumulated thousands of liters of chemical and biological weapons and is not afraid to use them, in fact he has used them against Iran and his own people. He planned an attempted assassination of an American president. He defies U.N. resolutions that ended the '91 Gulf War, which called for the destruction of all weapons of mass destruction.”