"If Saddam rejects peace and we have to use force, ourpurpose is clear. We want to seriously diminish the threat posed by Iraq's weapons of mass destruction program." - President Clinton, Feb. 17, 1998
So, you're sitting there as President, you're reeling in the aftermath of this (9/11 attacks), so, yeah, you want to go get bin Laden and do Afghanistan and all that. But you also have to say, well, my first responsibility now is to try everything possible to make sure that this terrorist network and other terrorist networks cannot reach chemical and biological weapons or small amounts of fissile material. I've got to do that. That's why I supported the Iraq thing. There was a lot of stuff unaccounted for. So I thought the President had an absolute responsibility to go to the U.N. and say, "Look, guys, after 9/11, you have got to demand that Saddam Hussein lets us finish the inspection process." You couldn't responsibly ignore [the possibility that] a tyrant had these stocks. I never really thought he'd [use them]. What I was far more worried about was that he'd sell this stuff or give it away. Same thing I've always been worried about North Korea's nuclear and missile capacity. I don't expect North Korea to bomb South Korea, because they know it would be the end of their country. But if you can't feed yourself, the temptation to sell this stuff is overwhelming. So that's why I thought Bush did the right thing to go back. When you're the President, and your country has just been through what we had, you want everything to be accounted for. –Bill Clinton, 2004
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All told, I think I count at least 7 false statements in the above 2 quotes implying the threatening existence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. If we were to go back over the entire presidency of Bill Clinton and review all of his his public statements, it's quite conceivable that we could come up with tens, if not hundreds of similarly false statements.
It is therefore the conclusion of this study that these false statements --along with similar statements by a majority of democrats who voted for war authorization-- were part of an orchestrated campaign that effectively galvanized public opinion and, in the process, led the nation to war under decidedly false pretenses.
