Senator Lugar will also travel to Libya for official meetings as a part of the president's initiative to move toward more normal relations reflecting that country's renunciation of terrorism and abandonment of its weapons of mass destruction and longer range missiles.
What we will not wait for is that particular nexus of terrorism, weapons of mass destruction that is extremism, and the technology to come together in a way that is harmful to the United States.
The United States has no credible evidence that Iraq moved weapons of mass destruction into Syria early last year before the U.S.-led war that drove Saddam Hussein from power.
He (Saddam Hussein) has not developed any significant capability with respect to weapons of mass destruction. He is unable to project conventional power against his neighbours.
I am confident that we will find evidence that makes it clear he had weapons of mass destruction.
It was President [Bill] Clinton and the United States congress in 1998 which said that the regime has to be changed because the regime would not give up its weapons of mass destruction. We came into office in 2001 and kept that policy because Saddam Hussein had not changed.
Change of regime with respect to Iraq had nothing to do with this; it had everything to do with the fact that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. And at the time change in regime as a policy came into effect in 1998, it was seen as the only way to compel Iraq to get rid of its weapons of mass destruction.
It remains our policy to change the regime until such time as the regime changes itself. So far, we cannot be sure that he is cooperating or he [Saddam Hussein] is acting in a way that could give us comfort, or should give the international community comfort, that he is giving up his weapons of mass destruction. He continues to give us statements that suggest he is not in possession of weapons of mass destruction when we know he is.
Our failure was that our intelligence community thought [Saddam Hussein ] had stockpiled weapons of mass destruction. That was a mistake. There is fallibility in human intelligence and in human decisions.
I think all of the attention of the world, to include the attention of the Arab world, should be on Saddam Hussein and whether or not he is prepared to give up the weapons of mass destruction that he has used to terrorise the region.
I regret that the presentation I made at the UN turned out to be wrong. It was wrong on the stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction, but pretty much right on intentions and capabilities.
All this could be part of a plan. There is no way an atheist can prove it’s not. But it’s some plan, isn't it? With mass destruction, pitiless extermination, annihilation going on all the time. And all of this set in motion on a scale that’s absolutely beyond our imagination, in order that the pope can tell people not to jerk off.
Hawks favor war on the grounds that Saddam Hussein is reckless, tyrannical and instinctively aggressive, and that if he comes into possession of nuclear weapons in addition to the weapons of mass destruction he already has, he is likely to use them or share them with terrorists. The threat of mass death on a scale never before seen residing in the hands of an unstable madman is intolerable – and must be preempted.
We should be hell bent on getting those weapons of mass destruction, hell bent on having a credible approach to them, but we should try to do it in a way which keeps the world together and that achieves our goal which is removing the... defanging Saddam.
With the exception of weapons of mass destruction, there is no other type of attack that is more effective than suicide terrorism. The perception is that it's impossible to guard against.
We are against any WMD, any weapons of mass destruction, whether chemical or nuclear.
We have to find ways in which, collectively, we agree there's some things that government needs to do to help protect us, that in this age of non-state actors who can amass great power, I want my government - and I think the German people should want their government - to be able to find out if a terrorist organization has access to a weapon of mass destruction that might go off in the middle of Berlin.
The liberation of Iraq was part of a broader effort to seriously confront the greatest threat to world security: rogue states capable of obtaining long range weapons of mass destruction.
The proliferation of weapons of mass destruction and their means of delivery is a threat to both the Nato allies and Russia.
I personally think that today, Iraq without Saddam Hussein is a truly better Iraq than with Saddam Hussein. But, naturally, I also feel uncomfortable due to the fact that we were misled with the information on weapons of mass destruction.
The United States was the one nullifying any attempt in the Security Council of the United Nations to sanction those fascist governments, really segregationist and racist. The same thing it is doing for Israel is what it used to do for South Africa who ended up having seven nuclear weapons. Why didn't they act against them like they did against Iraq for the so called weapons of mass destruction during Bush that never existed in the first place?
And whatever their publicized angst over Saddam Hussein's 'weapons of mass destruction,' American and British authorities were also concerned about violence in an area that harbors a resource indispensable for the functioning of the word economy. I am saddened that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows: the Iraq war is largely about oil.
