Washington DC (November 9, 2005) – Senator Harry Reid (D-Nevada), the Senate Democrat Minority leader, continued the ongoing partisan efforts to blame the President for misleading the country to war in Iraq. Today at a press conference on Capitol Hill, Mr. Reid presented a compilation of the “president’s lies” with regard to the weapons of mass destruction that were used to propel the country into the “quagmire of Iraq.” Here is what the President had said:“If Saddam rejects peace, and we have to use force, our purpose is clear: We want to seriously diminish the threat posed by Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction program.”
“If he refuses or continues to evade his obligations through more tactics of delay and deception, he and he alone will be to blame for the consequences … Now, let’s imagine the future. What if he fails to comply, and we fail to act, or we take some ambiguous third route, which gives him yet more opportunities to develop this program of weapons of mass destruction? Well, he will conclude that the international community has lost its will. He will then conclude that he can go right on and do more to rebuild an arsenal of devastating destruction. And some day, some way, I guarantee you, he’ll use the arsenal. And I think every one of you who’s really worked on this for any length of time believes that, too.”
“We have to defend out future from these predators of the 21st century…They will be all the more lethal if we allow them to build arsenals of nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons and the missiles to deliver them. We simple cannot allow that to happen. There is no more clear example of this threat than Saddam Hussein.”
The press conference ended however in a somewhat awkward moment for the Democrat Senator from Nevada, as the National Archives have confirmed that President Bush was not the author of these statements, which were actually made by President Clinton in 1998.
