Jacqueline Cabasso, Executive Director of the Western States Legal Foundation: "The hypocrisy in this speech -- and in the Bush Administration’s overall national security strategy -- is monumental. If having weapons of mass destruction and a history of using them is a criteria, then surely the United States must pose the greatest threat to humanity that has ever existed. While Bush warns that 'we cannot wait for the final proof.... the smoking gun that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud,' his September 2002 National Security Strategy states that 'America will act against...emerging threats before they are fully formed....by acting preemptively.' And his top-secret Nuclear Posture Review, leaked to the New York Times earlier this year, reveals that 'U.S. nuclear forces will continue to provide assurance.... in the event of surprising military developments....Current examples of immediate contingencies include an Iraqi attack on Israel or its neighbors....' It doesn’t take a lot of imagination to predict that if Iraq is attacked by the U.S. it might launch whatever it has at Israel -- itself a nuclear power. Further, while the U.S. is massively expanding its biological weapons research capabilities ­ for example by upgrading its bioresearch facilities at the Livermore and Los Alamos Nuclear weapons labs to aerosolize live anthrax and genetically modify bioorganisms ­ it is blocking a protocol to the Biological Weapons Convention that would allow international inspectors into U.S. facilities. The Bush Administration’s unilateral headlong rush to war threatens to unleash unprecedented regional instability and potentially catastrophic loss of life. It’s hard to image a more self-destructive course of action."