Leadership Quote by Al Gore

A fear sentence dressed up as inevitability, Gore's line works by closing the door on alternatives before the argument even begins. "Proven impossible to deter" sounds empirical, almost clinical, but it smuggles in a sweeping claim: that every tool short of regime change has already failed, and therefore escalation isn't preference but duty. It's a classic move in national-security rhetoric: convert uncertainty into momentum.

The subtext is aimed as much at Washington as at Baghdad. Coming from a sitting vice president in the late 1990s, it signals seriousness to allies and adversaries while pressuring domestic skeptics: if deterrence is "impossible", then containment looks like denial. The kicker is the conditional "for as long as Saddam is in power", which narrows the policy menu to a single, politically legible solution. It's not an explicit call for invasion, but it draws the moral map that later makes invasion feel like the only coherent endpoint.

Context matters: this is post-Gulf War, post-inspections brinkmanship, with the Clinton administration periodically striking Iraq and battling over access for UN weapons inspectors. In that climate, "weapons of mass destruction" functions less as a specific inventory than as a symbol of unchecked threat, a term elastic enough to unify hawks, centrists, and anxious voters.

What makes the line rhetorically effective is its fusion of resolve and resignation. It offers the audience a grim simplicity: no messy calibration, no patience, just a problem that lasts exactly as long as one man remains standing.