Transcript
SENATOR JOSEPH I. LIEBERMAN: We meet at a most important, dangerous, and difficult time in Iraq. Americans, Iraqis, and other nationals are dying in increasing numbers there. The outcome of the current conflict will have an enormous effect on the security of the American people, the freedom of the Iraqi people, and the stability and peace of the Middle East and the world. The days and weeks immediately ahead are fateful and they are perilous.
Yet, here at home, it is mostly politics as usual. Today, I am pleading with members of both political parties, with the Administration and the Congress, in the name of the hundreds of Americans who have already fallen in Iraq, and the thousands who continue to serve us there, in the interest of our nation's security, and in pursuit of our nation's highest ideals, to stop the bickering, to overcome the mistrust, to appreciate how similar are our current goals in Iraq, and to work together to achieve them.
In short, I am calling for a bipartisan political truce on the homefront that will greatly help us achieve the victory we all desire on the battlefront.
From the beginning, I was a strong supporter of the war in Iraq against Saddam Hussein. He was a dictator, warmonger, terrorist, outlaw, murderer, torturer, thief, and thug. As long as he remained in power, Saddam was a clear and present danger to the United States, the Iraqi people, the Middle East and the world. By his evil, inhumane actions and his decade of defiance of UN resolutions, he proved that he could only be dealt with and defeated by force. He was a ticking time bomb that had to be stopped before the next explosion. That is why we went to war last year in Iraq - to end Hussein's regime of terror, and to build in its place a better, freer future for the Iraqi people.
Thanks to the brilliance and bravery of American and allied forces, we won that war. But the final test of war is the quality of the peace that follows. Today we are clearly engaged in a new war in Iraq. From the day of Saddam's fall, the Iraqi people's hopes for a better life and the Coalition force's lives have been attacked by an evil alliance of remnants of Saddam's regime who refuse to accept defeat and of fanatical foreign and Iraqi terrorists who are part of the same jihadist movement that mercilessly attacked us on September 11, 2001.
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