Political Quotes

“I would like to paraphrase a poem that Rudyard Kipling wrote upon the death of his son in World War I that seems particularly apt to the war in Iraq: When they ask why the young men died Tell them it's because the old men lied. Madam Speaker, when the White House announced 4 years ago the U.S. military would attack Iraq under the guise of the global war on terrorism, there wasn't one single uniformed military officer who believed that Iraq was part of a global war on terrorism. Saddam had had nothing to do with the 9/11 attack. Saddam wasn't harboring any al Qaeda cells that did attack us. In fact, they understood that starting a new war would distract us and limit us from accomplishing our immediate need to eliminate Osama bin Laden. Saddam was a vicious, secular, despotic dictator, but he saw al Qaeda as a threat to his control, and al Qaeda viewed Saddam as an enemy of their religious extremist world vision. The U.S. Intelligence Community knew that there was no clear evidence that Saddam was a threat to the United States. There was no failure of our professional Intelligence Community, but there was an abysmal failure of our political leadership. So how did we get to this point? First we were scared with the threat of Saddam's arsenals or weapons of mass destruction, al Qaeda training camps, an Iraqi meeting with the 9/11 hijacker, mobile labs, aluminum tubing, yellow cake uranium. But there were no weapons of mass destruction, Madam Speaker.”