Mr. Speaker, I rise today with a heavy heart. I have always supported diplomacy as the first answer in ending the Iraqi crisis. However, in the last few days before the war began, it was apparent to me that diplomatic efforts had been exhausted. The Iraqi regime wilfully subverted every single UN resolution, despite numerous opportunities to comply. Saddam Hussein caused this war.
One hundred years ago, John Stuart Mills stated:
War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest thing. The decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks that nothing is worth war is much worse.
Closer to home, an Iraqi Canadian named Abdul stated the following in my local paper over the weekend:
If you have to choose between Saddam Hussein and anything else, you would choose anything else.
People like Abdul desperately want an end to the evil of Hussein's regime. It is time the government stopped sulking--