National Security Council (NSC) Biography

"The interesting thing about the Iraq case was that the United Nations had determined that Saddam Hussein was a threat. This is a regime that was sanctioned by the United Nations 17 times in resolutions, many of them referring directly to the threat of his weapons of mass destruction. This was a regime in which the United Nations had tried to put inspectors into the country, only to have them effectively pulled out of the country because they couldn't do their work. These were -- this was a regime that had lost a war in 1991, signed on to a set of obligations to the United Nations, and then systematically violated them. And so the idea that somehow this was an American decision to deal with the Iraqi regime, what the United States finally did -- not just the United States but a number of other countries, as well -- is to say that if U.N. resolutions are to actually matter, if countries are not just to violate them without -- with impunity, to have no responsibility for violating those, then the U.N. is not going to be very strong. The Security Council is not going to be very strong. And, indeed, Resolution 1441, the one that set up new inspections was a 15 to 0 vote of the U.N. Security Council."