On March 11, 2003, at a convention for Veterans of Foreign Wars in Washington, D.C., former U.S. Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz said: “Those very weapons [banned from Iraq by the U.N.] are the source of our concern. The issue is not about Iraqi oil. If the United States had wanted access to Iraqi oil, we would have dropped our whole policy 12 years ago, lifted sanctions, and let Saddam Hussein keep his weapons of mass destruction.”
– Paul Wolfowitz, Transcript of Paul Wolfowitz’ Washington, D.C., Speech to War Veterans, CNN, March 11, 2003