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But, as you have intimated, I am among those who would be very wary of any military action in the light of Saddam Hussein's willingness to allow the weapons inspectors to go in.

We ask the military to be in a position that, if we ask them to do a task, they are absolutely able to do it for us.

Even before September 11, there was a debate in the administration about whether or not military force should be used to oust Saddam Hussein. You're not going to find one person in the top echelons of the foreign policy and national security establishment in the U.S. government who's going to say that Saddam Hussein should not be out of power.

We want to look at how we would respond because, as hard as we work to prevent terrorist attacks here North America, if we have a catastrophic terrorist attack, it is the military that is going to have to go in at the request of civilian authorities.

The United States will do whatever we have to do to protect our forces.

If we have reason to believe someone is preparing an attack against the U.S., has developed that capability, harbours those aspirations, then I think the U.S. is justified in dealing with that, if necessary, by military force.

In addition to a timeline, I have proposed that U.S. troops be removed from front line combat positions in Iraqi cities and towns, turning over daily security patrols, interactions with citizens, and any offensive security actions to the Iraqis themselves.

We've gotten a long way on missile defense. We know how to do it. We know how to take down incoming warheads, but we need to do a lot more work in order to be - to deploy a system that'll defend the United States against those kinds of limited strikes that might be possible by a nuclear armed North Korea or Iran.

Iraq's search for weapons of mass destruction has proven impossible to deter and we should assume that it will continue for as long as Saddam is in power.