Politics & Power Quote by Tom Daschle

Daschle’s line is built like a prosecutor’s closing argument: concede the obvious, isolate the exceptional, deliver the moral verdict. The opening clause quietly punctures a simplistic fear narrative. By admitting Iraq isn’t unique in possessing weapons of mass destruction, he signals sobriety, even a check on panic. Then he pivots hard: the real difference isn’t capability, it’s character - a leader who has already crossed the line of deploying such weapons on his own citizens. That contrast tries to move the debate from speculative threat to demonstrated behavior.

The subtext is political triage. In the early 2000s, “WMD” was becoming a catch-all justification for action, but it was also a shaky evidentiary claim. Daschle shores up the case by leaning on a grim historical fact Americans had seen referenced for years: Saddam Hussein’s chemical attacks, especially the late-1980s atrocities against Kurds. It’s a way of saying: you don’t need to prove what’s hidden today if you can prove what was done before.

The rhetorical move also narrows moral ambiguity. “Used them against his own people” turns a foreign-policy question into a crime-within-the-family, a betrayal that reads as uniquely illegitimate. It’s persuasive because it reframes intervention as prevention plus punishment, with human rights as the emotional payload. It also quietly invites a double standard: other nations may have these weapons, but their leaders are presumed more restrained - an assumption doing a lot of work beneath the sentence’s confidence.