Can be found here.
…In North Africa, Libya?s leader decided in December to disclose and eliminate his country?s chemical, biological and nuclear weapon programs, as well as his ballistic missiles. In the weeks since, Libya has turned over equipment and documents relating to nuclear and missile programs — including long-range ballistic missile guidance sets and centrifuge parts for uranium enrichment — and has begun the destruction of its unfilled chemical munitions. With these important steps, Libya has acted and announced to the world that they want to disarm and to prove they are doing so.
Compare Libya?s recent behavior to the behavior of the Iraqi regime. Saddam Hussein could have opened up his country to the world — just as Kazakhstan, Ukraine, and South Africa had done — and as Libya is doing today.
Instead, he chose the path of deception and defiance. He gave up tens of billions of dollars in oil revenues under the U.N. sanctions, when he could have had those sanctions lifted simply by demonstrating that he had disarmed. He passed up the ?final opportunity? that was given to him in the UN Resolution 1441 to prove that his programs were ended and his weapons were destroyed.
Even after the statues of Saddam Hussein were falling in Baghdad, the Iraqi regime continued to hide and destroy evidence systematically going through ministries destroying what they could get their hands on.
We may never know why Saddam Hussein chose the destruction of his regime over peaceful disarmament. But we know this: it was his choice. And if he had chosen differently — if the Iraqi regime had taken the steps Libya is now taking — there would have been no war…
…The advance of freedom does not come without cost or sacrifice. Last November, I was in South Korea during their debate on whether or not they should send South Korean forces to Iraq. A woman journalist came up to me and put a microphone in front of my face — she was clearly too young to have experienced the Korean war — and she said to me in a challenging voice: ?Why should young South Koreans go halfway around the world to Iraq to get killed or wounded??
Now that’s a fair question. And I said it was a fair question. I also told her that I had just come from the Korean War memorial in Seoul and there’s a wall that has every state of the 50 states in the United States with [the names of] all the people who were killed in the Korean War. I was there to put a wreath on the memorial and before I walked down there I looked up at the wall and started studying the names and there, of course, was a very dear friend from high school who was on a football team with me, and he was killed the last day of the war — the very last day.
And I said to this woman, you know, that would have been a fair question for an American journalist to ask 50 years ago — why in the world should an American go halfway around the world to South Korea and get wounded or killed?
We were in a building that looked out on the city of Seoul and I said, I’ll tell you why. Look out the window. And out that window you could see lights and cars and energy and a vibrant economy and a robust democracy. And of course I said to her if you look above the demilitarized zone from satellite pictures of the Korean Peninsula, above the DMZ is darkness, nothing but darkness and a little portion (Inaudible.) of light where Pyongyang is. The same people had the same population, the same resources. And look at the difference. There are concentration camps. They’re starving. They’ve lowered the height for the people who go in the Army down to 4 feet 10 inches because people aren’t tall enough. They take people in the military below a hundred pounds. They’re 17, 18, 19 years old and frequently they look like they’re 13, 14, and 15 years old.
Korea was won at a terrible cost of life — thousands and thousands and thousands of people from the countries in this room. And was it worth it? You bet.
The world is a safer place today because the Coalition liberated 50 million people — 25 million in Afghanistan and 25 million in Iraq.
RTWT