1. to rid a sworn enemy of his WMD programsBut did President Bush ever offer these five reasons, in the same place and at the same time before the war, or did the Administration's justification for war change again and again after they found our WMD intelligence was flawed, as critics charge?
2. to respond to the Iraqi dictator's funding and harboring of terrorists
3. to enforce the terms of a cease fire and 14 years of related UN resolutions
4. to prevent further human suffering and exhume the mass graves
5. to promote freedom and democracy in the Middle East
President Bush's biggest speech on Iraq was given to the United Nations on Sept 12, 2002. Below are excerpts from that speech, and as you can see, they each fit into the categories listed above. In this speech, George W. Bush offers each one of these factors as reasons for military action in Iraq.
I'll let him explain, in his own words: "In one place -- in one regime -- we find all these dangers, in their most lethal and aggressive forms, exactly the kind of aggressive threat the United Nations was born to confront."
1. "the Iraqi regime agreed to destroy and stop developing all weapons of mass destruction and long-range missiles, and to prove to the world it has done so by complying with rigorous inspections. Iraq has broken every aspect of this fundamental pledge."
2. "Our greatest fear is that terrorists will find a shortcut to their mad ambitions when an outlaw regime supplies them with the technologies to kill on a massive scale... If the Iraqi regime wishes peace, it will immediately end all support for terrorism and act to suppress it, as all states are required to do by U.N. Security Council resolutions."
3. "To suspend hostilities, to spare himself, Iraq's dictator accepted a series of commitments. The terms were clear, to him and to all. And he agreed to prove he is complying with every one of those obligations. He has proven instead only his contempt for the United Nations, and for all his pledges. By breaking every pledge -- by his deceptions, and by his cruelties -- Saddam Hussein has made the case against himself."
4. "Last year, the U.N. Commission on Human Rights found that Iraq continues to commit extremely grave violations of human rights, and that the regime's repression is all pervasive. Tens of thousands of political opponents and ordinary citizens have been subjected to arbitrary arrest and imprisonment, summary execution, and torture by beating and burning, electric shock, starvation, mutilation, and rape. Wives are tortured in front of their husbands, children in the presence of their parents -- and all of these horrors concealed from the world by the apparatus of a totalitarian state."
5. "In the Middle East, there can be no peace for either side without freedom for both sides... Free societies do not intimidate through cruelty and conquest, and open societies do not threaten the world with mass murder. The United States supports political and economic liberty in a unified Iraq."