It has been, after all, 11 years, more than a decade now, of defiance of U.N. resolutions by Saddam Hussein. Every obligation that he signed onto after the Gulf War, so that he would not be a threat to peace and security, he has ignored and flaunted.

This remark comes from the George W. Bush administration’s public case for confronting Iraq in the run-up to the 2003 invasion. As National Security Advisor, Condoleezza Rice frequently argued that Saddam Hussein’s regime had spent the post–1991 Gulf War period evading or obstructing U.N. weapons inspections and violating the terms of the ceasefire embodied in U.N. Security Council resolutions. The “11 years” framing situates the issue from the 1991 war through 2002–2003, when the U.S. sought international backing and domestic support for coercive disarmament, emphasizing Iraq’s alleged pattern of noncompliance as a threat to international peace and security.

Rice’s statement compresses a complex diplomatic and legal history into a moral-political narrative of persistent defiance. By emphasizing duration (“more than a decade”) and breadth (“every obligation”), the quote aims to shift the debate from whether Iraq was currently in compliance to whether its long record made further patience irrational or dangerous. The appeal to U.N. resolutions also functions rhetorically to present U.S. action as enforcement of international order rather than unilateral choice. In this framing, Saddam Hussein’s noncompliance is treated not as episodic dispute but as a sustained repudiation of the post-1991 settlement, justifying escalation.