[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 148 (2002), Part 12]
[House]
[Page 16414]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




              NO LINK BETWEEN SADDAM HUSSEIN AND AL QAEDA

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under a previous order of the House, the 
gentleman from Oregon (Mr. DeFazio) is recognized for 5 minutes.
  Mr. DeFAZIO. Mr. Speaker, today's press reveals that the Bush 
administration has decided that they can find no linkage between Saddam 
Hussein and al Qaeda, despite some of the offhand remarks of Secretary 
Rumsfeld and Vice President Cheney to the contrary. The intelligence 
agencies, turning all of their resources to this, cannot find existing 
links.
  So that means that the President and his administration will have to 
make the case against Saddam Hussein to this Congress because the 
authorization passed by this Congress last fall was for the President 
to respond to those who were involved in the attacks and those who 
harbored or sponsored such attacks. That means a straight-up debate on 
the floor of the House of Representatives, hopefully a free and fair 
debate, over the wisdom of the first- ever preemptive war by the United 
States of America against Iraq.
  I believe that the burden the administration has to prove that the 
United States should break from all precedents in more than 200 years 
of history, should break from all precedents set lawfully under the 
United Nations conventions since the end of World War II and actually 
launch a preemptive war, is an extraordinary burden. They have to prove 
a very real, credible threat by the Saddam Hussein regime.
  Now Saddam Hussein is a despicable individual. He has murdered tens 
of thousands, and all effective opposition. He has murdered people 
ethnically, religiously. He has used weapons of mass destruction. He 
has an absolutely horrible record, and obviously we would not trust 
this gentleman one inch.
  But the question in this case becomes what is different today than a 
year ago or 2 years ago in terms of Saddam Hussein. It seems, when 
asked honestly and privately, the generals and admirals at the Pentagon 
feel containment is working, that he did not pose a credible and 
immediate threat to the United States of America or its allies in that 
region.
  So the question becomes then if he is credibly threatened with a 
preemptive war, would he become more of a threat? Then there is the 
issue of our allies. Would any allies support the United States in this 
endeavor? Then there are the questions from 10 years ago, the same 
questions that President Bush's father had to confront, and Colin 
Powell as chairman of the joint chiefs, which is what if they went to 
Baghdad and took out Hussein, what then? They were confronted with a 
long and problematic occupation of Iraq and further destabilization in 
the region. And even with all the allies, including Arab nations at the 
time, they felt it was not worth the risk of doing that.

                              {time}  1330

  Well, the same question needs to be asked today. In fact, I witnessed 
on ``Face the Nation,'' where one Republican Senator said, ``Well, we 
don't need any allies. We will just go and do this. We will take them 
out.'' And then he said, ``We will rule Iraq.''
  I do not know who he has been talking to or what he is thinking, but 
the United States being involved intimately in that region and trying 
to rule a country, a very large country, in an extraordinarily volatile 
area, is a recipe for disaster. So they need not only a credible plan 
for what if and how and why; but they need to explain that, both to 
Congress, some of it can be confidentially, but, for the most part, 
these should be things that could be laid out.
  Prime Minister Chretien said yesterday that the President had nothing 
new to say. It was just the same rhetorical sort of ``we have got to 
remove him sooner or later,'' the same thing we have been hearing from 
Ms. Rice and other advisers to the President.
  So I have sent a letter to the President, signed by 17 other Members 
of Congress, which lays out a series of about 20 questions that I 
believe are critical that this administration address before they would 
undertake to ask even for authorization for a preemptive war, the first 
ever in our history; and I am hopeful that the administration will in 
good faith answer those questions. Most of them are questions that 
could be answered in public, could be given to the American people, and 
could, if they answer them I believe convincingly, as they have not 
thus far, lead to some sort of authorization from the United States 
Congress.
  But we cannot just sort of have this shadow boxing and discussion in 
private. This is an extraordinary issue, a constitutional issue, an 
issue that breaks with all precedent of this country; something that 
needs to be fully, freely, and fairly debated before the American 
people before we commit our sons and daughters to lengthy involvement 
in a war against Iraq and a subsequent occupation and rebuilding of 
that country. We are not doing such a great job of stabilizing and 
rebuilding Afghanistan. One has to question what we would do with a 
much larger nation in a much more volatile region of the world.

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