sen (d-fl) bob graham on cspan washington journal this morning, 2/3/2004.
"i can't telll you what 535 members of congress had in mind when they voted either for or agianst the war. let me tell you why i voted against the war.
we were facing a number of evil people in the middle east & central asia of which saddam hussein was one. clearly he had abused his own people, gone to war two times, was a genuinely bad human being.
the problem is, there are a lot of other genuinely bad human beings in that part of the world & we had to determine which was our first priority.
my standard of answering that question is which of these evils has the greatest opportunity to kill americans?
by that standard, it was a no contest; al quaida had shown the will to kill americans, the ability to kill americans, to kill 3000 on september the 11th, & had a significant prescense inside the united states of america from which to launch other attacks to kill americans.
frankly saddam hussein had none of those qualities.
so i voted against the war because i thought it was a distraction from our greatest threat, which was osama bin laden & al quaida & i am afraid i have been right.
the fact is that we had al quaida on the ropes in the spring of 2002. we allowed it to rise up & re-generate & now, a whole series of terrorist attacks...fortunatley none inside the united states, they have occured around the world.
al quaida, the other international terrorist groups, in my judgement, continue to be the number one threat to the people of the united states."