#1 "If we fail to respond today, Saddam and all those who would follow in his footsteps will be emboldened tomorrow by the knowledge that they can act with impunity, even in the face of a clear message from the United Nations Security Council and clear evidence of a weapons of mass destruction program."
President Clinton
Address to Joint Chiefs of Staff and Pentagon staff
February 17, 1998
#2 Congressman Gephardt links Saddam with the threat of terrorists nuking US cities:
BOB SCHIEFFER, Chief Washington Correspondent:
And with us now is the Democratic presidential candidate Dick Gephardt. Congressman, you supported taking military action in Iraq. Do you think now it was the right thing to do?
REP. RICHARD GEPHARDT, D-MO, Democratic Presidential Candidate:
I do. I base my determination on what I heard from the CIA. I went out there a couple of times and talked to everybody, including George Tenet. I talked to people in the Clinton administration.
SCHIEFFER:
Well, let me just ask you, do you feel, Congressman, that you were misled?
GEPHARDT:
I don't. I asked very direct questions of the top people in the CIA and people who'd served in the Clinton administration. And they said they believed that Saddam Hussein either had weapons or had the components of weapons or the ability to quickly make weapons of mass destruction. What we're worried about is an A-bomb in a Ryder truck in New York, in Washington and St. Louis. It cannot happen. We have to prevent it from happening. And it was on that basis that I voted to do this.
#3 "No one has done what Saddam Hussein has done, or is thinking of doing. He is producing weapons of mass destruction, and he is qualitatively and quantitatively different from other dictators."
Madeleine Albright, President Clinton's Secretary of State
February 18, 1998
#4 "Ten years after the Gulf War and Saddam is still there and still continues to stockpile weapons of mass destruction. Now there are suggestions he is working with al Qaeda, which means the very terrorists who attacked the United States last September may now have access to chemical and biological weapons."
James P. Rubin, President Clinton's State Department spokesman