Don Nickles: “the primary reason I came to the floor this afternoon is to speak about the administration's failed policy on Iraq. I…”

“the primary reason I came to the floor this afternoon is to speak about the administration's failed policy on Iraq. I say it is a failed policy. I wish that weren't the case, but it is. It is a failed policy. The administration, this administration, President Clinton, inherited a situation where President Bush and the Secretary of State had won the war with Iraq. We achieved our military objective, which was to get Iraq out of Kuwait. We stated that was our objective. We accomplished that objective. We came home. We implemented sanctions against Iraq for its invasion of Kuwait in the summer of 1990. We had a total embargo on Iraqi products, including oil. Oil was the No. 1 product, or commodity, that Iraq exported. It provided 95 percent, I believe, of its foreign currencies. We put that embargo on because they invaded a neighbor. And, frankly, they probably intended to invade other neighbors--maybe Saudi Arabia-- and really became the dominating power in the Persian Gulf. We didn't think that was right. We sent 550,000 troops. We stopped them. We kicked them out of Kuwait, and we imposed sanctions to make sure that we would get rid of their weapons of mass destruction, because we knew they were building chemical and biological weapons and possibly nuclear weapons.”