Iraqi Prime Minister Ayad Allawi gave a moving address Thursday to the U.S. Congress.
I stand here today as the prime minister of a country emerging finally from dark ages of violence, aggression, corruption and greed. Like almost every Iraqi, I have many friends who were murdered, tortured or raped by the regime of Saddam Hussein.Well over a million Iraqis were murdered or are missing. We estimate at least 300,000 in mass graves, which stands as monuments to the inhumanity of Saddam's regime. Thousands of my Kurdish brothers and sisters were gassed to death by Saddam's chemical weapons.
Millions more like me were driven into exile. Even in exile, as I myself can vouch, we were not safe from Saddam.
And as we lived under tyranny at home, so our neighbors lived in fear of Iraq's aggression and brutality. Reckless wars, use of weapons of mass destruction, the needless loss of hundreds of thousands of lives and the financing and exporting of terrorism, these were Saddam's legacy to the world.
My friends, today we are better off, you are better off and the world is better off without Saddam Hussein.
Your decision to go to war in Iraq was not an easy one but it was the right one.
There are no words that can express the debt of gratitude that future generations of Iraqis will owe to Americans. It would have been easy to have turned your back on our plight, but this is not the tradition of this great country, nor for the first time in history you stood up with your allies for freedom and democracy.
Read the transcript. View the speech via C-SPAN (Real).
John Kerry, passionate internationalist, could not be bothered to attend, but that did not stop him from accusing Allawi, who serves under daily assassination attempts, of lying.
Note: for the record, both Kerry and John Edwards missed the Senate vote on Porter Goss's nomination as DCI Director. Such a pair.
Posted by Alan at September 24, 2004 06:23 AM