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Iraq''s full disarmament necessary to avoid war.

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A month before the shooting started, Britain's prime minister warned that if Saddam Hussein failed to disarm, there would be no alternative to war to rid Iraq of its weapons of mass destruction. If he were left with these weapons, history dictates that he would have used them. Tony Blair's speech to the U.K. House of Commons, February 25, 2003.

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Let me again briefly recap the history of the Iraqi crisis. In 1991 at the conclusion of the Gulf War, the true extent of Saddam's WMD program became clear. We knew he had used these weapons against his own people, and against a foreign country, Iran, but we had not known that in addition to chemical weapons, he bad biological weapons which he had denied completely and was trying to construct a nuclear weapons program.

So on 3 April 1991, the UN passed the first UN Resolution on Saddam and WMD, giving him 15 days to give an open account of all his weapons and cooperate fully with the UN inspectors in destroying them. 15 days later he submitted a flawed and incomplete declaration denying he had biological weapons and giving little information on chemical weapons. It was only four years later after the defection of Saddam's son-in-law to Jordan, that the offensive biological weapons and the full extent of the nuclear program were discovered. In all, 17 UN Resolutions were passed. None was obeyed. At no stage did he cooperate. At no stage did he tell the full truth.

Finally in December 1998 when he had begun to obstruct and harass the UN inspectors, they withdrew. When they left they said there were still large amounts of WMD unaccounted for. Since then the...