[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 148 (2002), Part 12]
[Senate]
[Pages 16769-16770]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                                  IRAQ

  Mr. LIEBERMAN. Mr. President, I rise today to voice my strong support 
for the convincing call to action against Iraq that President Bush 
issued yesterday at the United Nations to discuss the unique dangers 
created by Saddam Hussein's regime and to argue that it is imperative 
that the international community, led by the United States of America, 
mobilize now to eliminate those dangers.
  On September 11, 2001, a foreboding new chapter in American history 
began. On that day, our Government was reawakened in this new century 
to its oldest and most solemn responsibility: protecting the lives and 
liberty of the American people.
  As we survey the landscape of threats to our security in the years 
ahead, the greatest are terrorists--al-Qaida and rogue regimes such as 
Saddam Hussein's.
  Saddam hates America and Americans and is working furiously to 
accumulate deadly weapons of mass destruction and the missiles, planes, 
and unmanned aerial vehicles to use in attacking distant targets.
  Every day Saddam remains in power is a day of danger for the Iraqi 
people, for Iraq's neighbors, for the American people, and for the 
world. As long as Saddam remains in power, there will be no genuine 
security and no lasting peace in the Middle East, among the Arab 
nations or among the Arabs, Israelis, and Christians who live there.
  The threat Saddam poses has been articulated so often that some may 
have grown numb to the reality of his brutality. But after September 
11, we must reacquaint ourselves with him because if we do not 
understand and act, his next victims, like Osama bin Laden's, could be 
innocent Americans.
  President Bush advanced that process with great effectiveness in his 
speech at the U.N. yesterday, albeit after a season long on the beating 
of drums of war and short on explaining why war may now be necessary. 
But the President did that yesterday in New York. Now we, in Congress, 
must go forward together with him as the Constitution's competing 
clauses require us to do. Each of us must decide what actions will best 
advance America's values and secure the future of the American people.
  The essential facts are known. We know of the weapons in Saddam's 
possession--chemical, biological, and nuclear in time. We know of his 
unequaled willingness to use them. We know his history, his invasions 
of his neighbors, his dreams of achieving hegemonic control over the 
Arab world, his record of anti-American rage, his willingness to 
terrorize, to slaughter, to suppress his own people and others. And we 
need not stretch to imagine nightmare scenarios in which Saddam makes 
common cause with the terrorists who want to kill Americans and destroy 
our way of life.
  Indeed, 2 days ago on September 11, 2002, the state-owned newspaper 
in Iraq showed a picture of the World Trade Center's Twin Towers in 
flames with the headline ``God's Punishment.''
  This man--Saddam Hussein--is a menace to the people and the peace of 
the world. It was his brutal invasion of his peaceful neighbor, Kuwait, 
in August 1990 that first and finally convinced America and the world 
that Saddam had become a tyrant, like so many before him in world 
history, who had to be stopped before he did terrible damage to his 
people, his region, and the wider world. I was privileged in January of 
1991 to join with my colleague from Virginia, Senator John Warner, in 
sponsoring the Senate resolution that authorized the first President 
Bush to go to war against Saddam.
  The American military fought bravely and brilliantly, in that 
conflict and won an extraordinary victory in rolling back Saddam's 
invasion of Kuwait. But we did not achieve total victory. On April 9, 
1991, I came to the Senate floor and expressed my disappointment that 
our forces in Desert Storm had not been authorized to remove Saddam 
from power, while his military was in disarray.
  I said then: ``The United States must pursue final victory over 
Saddam. We must use all reasonable diplomatic, economic, and military 
means to achieve his removal from power. Until that end is realized, 
the peace and stability of the region will not have been fully 
accomplished.''
  In 1997 and 1998, I joined with Senators Bob Kerrey, Trent Lott, and 
John McCain to introduce the Iraq Liberation Act, which established in 
law for the first time that it is U.S. policy to change the regime in 
Baghdad, not just contain it, and authorized specific assistance, 
including military training and equipment, to the Iraqi opposition in 
furtherance of that goal. That declaration was based on Saddam's record 
of barbarism before, during and after the gulf war, and his repeated 
violations of U.N. resolutions.
  On November 13, 1998, after Saddam ejected the U.N. weapons 
inspectors, I said, ``If we let him block the inspections and the 
monitoring that he agreed to as a condition of the cease-fire in the 
gulf war, then there is no doubt that one day soon, he will use weapons 
of mass destruction, carried by ballistic missiles, against Americans 
in the Middle East or against our allies.''
  Since then, months and years have passed and the danger from Baghdad 
has only grown greater. International pressure--legal, diplomatic, 
economic, and political--has failed to change Saddam's behavior. 
Growing stockpiles of Iraqi weapons, toxins, and delivery systems have 
accumulated. So too has a growing pile of U.N. resolutions which Saddam 
has persistently defied. They testify to the repeated opportunities the 
international community has given him to prove he has changed and to 
his determination nonetheless to remain a recidivist international 
outlaw.
  As President Bush made clear yesterday, this must end. The hour of 
truth and decision has arrived. This is Saddam's last chance, and the 
United Nations' best chance to show that its declarations of 
international law stand for something more than the paper on which they 
are written. It is time for all nations, law abiding and peace loving, 
to make clear that, after September 11, the world will not hesitate or 
equivocate while a tyrant stocks his arsenal and builds alliances with 
terrorists.
  I am grateful that President Bush has effectively begun the critical 
work of educating the American people, the Congress, and the world 
about why. Our cause is just. The facts are on our side.
  ``Making this case'' is not a burden. It is the vital responsibility 
of a democracy's leaders when they have decided that our Nation's 
security may necessitate war.
  It is an extraordinary opportunity, as well, to engage our allies in 
meeting the greatest security threat of our generation before it is too 
late--not just

[[Page 16770]]

for us but for them. An opportunity to make the consequences of 
repeated defiance of the United Nations painfully clear to Iraq, and to 
any other government that might follow in its criminal path. An 
opportunity to show the world's law-abiding, peace-loving Muslim 
majority--who share the same values we do, the same aspirations we have 
for our families, and, I might add, the same extremist foes--that as we 
oppose tyranny and terror, we will actively support them in their fight 
for freedom and a better life.
  President Bush has acted wisely and decisively in asking the United 
Nations to lead this noble effort, to insist that Iraq obey its 
resolutions, and to be prepared to enforce them militarily if Iraq does 
not comply. But if Saddam does not comply, and the United Nations 
proves itself unwilling or unable to take decisive action, then the 
United States surely can and must assemble and lead an international 
military coalition to enforce the United Nations resolutions and 
liberate the Iraqi people, the Middle East and the world from Saddam 
Hussein. If we lead, I am confident many other nations will come to our 
side.
  For more than 11 years now, since the early spring of 1991, I have 
supported the use of military force to disarm Iraq and to remove Saddam 
Hussein from power. In fact, since the Iraq Liberation Act was passed 
by Congress and signed by President Clinton in 1998, that has been the 
law of our land. Therefore, I am fully supportive of such military 
action now.
  I know that many of my colleagues in the Senate believe thoughtfully 
and sincerely that it would be preferable to give support to the 
President in two stages, first to endorse yesterday's call for U.N. 
action, and then to return later, if the U.N. does not act, to 
authorize the use of America's military power against Iraq. Other 
Members of the Senate are understandably concerned that a debate on the 
question of war against Iraq may be unnecessarily politicized if it 
occurs in the more heated environment of this fall's congressional 
elections.
  But the White House has made it clear it will ask for a resolution of 
support and authorization in the very near future. Each member of the 
Senate must, and I am confident will, face that reality in a spirit of 
non-partisanship, going where their hearts and heads take them, in 
deciding how best to fulfill our Constitutional responsibility to 
provide for the common defense in the current circumstances. For my 
part, I intend to work with Members of both parties in the Senate with 
the White House to draft a Senate resolution that will receive the 
broadest possible bipartisan support for the President, as Commander in 
Chief, as he works to protect our Nation and the world from Saddam 
Hussein.
  On October 22, 1962, as nuclear weapons were being amassed in Cuba, 
President Kennedy spoke to the Nation and warned Americans of the need 
to act in the face of the rising threat. President Kennedy's courageous 
and eloquent words can guide us now. He said on that occasion.

       My fellow citizens, let no one doubt that this is a 
     difficult and dangerous effort on which we have set out. No 
     one can see precisely what course it will take or what costs 
     or casualties will be incurred. Many months of sacrifice and 
     self-discipline lie ahead, months in which many threats and 
     denunciations will keep us aware of our dangers. But the 
     greatest danger of all would be to do nothing.
       The path we have chosen for the present is full of hazards, 
     as all paths are, but it is the one most consistent with our 
     character and courage as a nation and our commitments around 
     the world. The cost of freedom is always high, and Americans 
     have always paid it but there is one path we shall never 
     choose, and that is the path of surrender or submission.
       Our goal is not the victory of might, but the vindication 
     of right--not peace at the expense of freedom, but both peace 
     and freedom, here . . . and, we hope, around the world. God 
     willing, that goal will be achieved.

  I yield the floor.

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