"The last point I want to make is we've got to be strong," he declared. "When we look weak in a time where people feel insecure, we lose. When people feel uncertain, they'd rather have somebody who's strong and wrong than somebody who's weak and right." Actually, this was also the first point he made in his hourlong speech, and he repeated it many times throughout. Supporting the war is insufficient, Clinton warned. "I approve of what's being done in Iraq now and the way it's being done, but it's not enough," he said.

And this is really where the question of Iraq comes in. There's a lot of debate about what should we do with Iraq, and when. And you may want to ask further questions, but I will just make one observation. Saddam Hussein presents no conventional military threat to us, and a much smaller one to his allies than he did before the Gulf War. His military strength, it is commonly conceded, is about 40 percent of what it was before the Gulf War. He did try to assassinate former President Bush in 1993 with the most clumsy terrorist operation I ever saw. The car bombs that we uncovered practically said, "made by the operatives of Saddam Hussein in Baghdad." But after we bombed his intelligence building, as far as we know, he never took another serious terrorist act himself. And the Bush administration has said that Iraq was not involved in September the 11th.

The problem he presents to the world is that he has laboratories working to produce chemical and biological weapons. And they would be working to produce nuclear weapons if they had any weapons grade plutonium. We know that from the people who have defected, we know that from what he's done in the past. We launched a military operation in 1998, after he threw the inspectors out in an attempt to destroy as many of those facilitates as possible. So would it be a good idea if he weren't there? And were replaced by someone committed to a responsible course with regard to weapons of mass destruction? Yes. Would it be a good idea if the people of Iraq weren't siding with him, since he's a murderer and a thug? Yes. Should we unilaterally attack him? Well, that depends. And you may want to ask me more about that, and I'll try to weave that into my remarks later on.