7 October
‘Tonight,’ said George W Bush, in a speech headed ‘Iraq: Denial and Deception’ on 7 October 2002, ‘I want to take a few minutes to discuss a grave threat to peace, and America’s determination to lead the world in confronting that threat.’
‘The threat,’ Bush continued, ‘comes from Iraq ... Eleven years ago, as a condition for ending the Persian Gulf War, the Iraqi regime was required to destroy its weapons of mass destruction, to cease all development of such weapons, and to stop all support for terrorist groups. The Iraqi regime has violated all of those obligations. It possesses and produces chemical and biological weapons. It is seeking nuclear weapons. It has given shelter and support to terrorism, and practises terror against its own people. The entire world has witnessed Iraq’s 11-year history of defiance, deception and bad faith.’
‘We know that Iraq and al Qaeda have had high-level contacts that go back a decade,’ Bush added. ‘We’ve learned that Iraq has trained al Qaeda members in bomb-making and poisons and deadly gases,’ he claimed. And ‘Iraq could decide on any given day to provide a biological or chemical weapon to a terrorist group or individual terrorists,’ he asserted.
Denial, deception and bad faith is about right.
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