quotations about the Iraq War
My belief is we will, in fact, be greeted as liberators.
DICK CHENEY
Meet the Press, March 16, 2003
I opposed the war in Iraq because I did not believe it was in our national security interest, and I still don't. What we [America] did was akin to taking a baseball bat to a beehive. Our primary security threat right now is terrorism ---and by doing what we did in Iraq, we've managed to alienate a good part of the world and most of the allies whose intelligence and other help we need to combat and defeat terrorism.
JERRY SPRINGER
interview, Jun. 23, 2003
There's a lot of money to pay for this ... the oil revenues of that country could bring between $50 and $100 billion over the course of the next two or three years ... We're dealing with a country that can really finance its own reconstruction, and relatively soon.
PAUL WOLFOWITZ
speaking to the House Appropriations Committee, March 27, 2003
First Afghanistan, now Iraq. So who's next? Syria? North Korea? Iran? Where will it all end? If these illegal interventions are permitted to continue, the implication seems to be, pretty soon, horror of horrors, no murderously repressive regimes might remain.
DANIEL KOFMAN
A Matter of Principle: Humanitarian Arguments for War in Iraq
Once we decided to focus on Iraq, we went to war too soon. We went without the rest of the world, and we went under false premises. This administration told us we would be greeted with open arms, that we had enough troops to stabilize the country, that Iraqi oil would pay for the reconstruction. They were wrong on each of these counts and many more. The result is a terrible irony. Iraq now risks becoming what it was not before the war: a haven for the very radical Islamic fundamentalists who would do us such harm.
JOE BIDEN
Congressional Record, October 6, 2005
Who will demand accountability for the failure of our national political leadership involved in the management this war? They have unquestionably been derelict in the performance of their duty. In my profession, these types of leaders would immediately be relieved or court-martialed.
LT. GEN. RICARDO S. SANCHEZ
speech in Arlington, VA, October 12, 2007
As a Texas loyalist who followed Bush to Washington with great hope and personal affection and as a proud member of his administration, I was all too ready to give him and his highly experienced foreign policy advisers the benefit of the doubt on Iraq. Unfortunately, subsequent events have showed that our willingness to trust the judgment of Bush and his team was misplaced.
SCOTT MCCLELLAN
What Happened
We want to say to America: Is it worth it to you? Won't you have have, afterward, decades of hostility in the Islamic world?
CARDINAL ANGELO SODANO
FOX News, March 12, 2003
I refuse to be lectured on national security by people who are responsible for the most disastrous set of foreign policy decisions in the recent history of the United States. The other side likes to use 9/11 as a political bludgeon. Well, let’s talk about 9/11. The people who were responsible for murdering 3,000 Americans on 9/11 have not been brought to justice. They are Osama bin Laden, al Qaeda and their sponsors – the Taliban. They were in Afghanistan. And yet George Bush and John McCain decided in 2002 that we should take our eye off of Afghanistan so that we could invade and occupy a country that had absolutely nothing to do with 9/11. The case for war in Iraq was so thin that George Bush and John McCain had to hype the threat of Saddam Hussein, and make false promises that we’d be greeted as liberators. They misled the American people, and took us into a misguided war. Here are the results of their policy. Osama bin Laden and his top leadership – the people who murdered 3000 Americans – have a safe-haven in northwest Pakistan, where they operate with such freedom of action that they can still put out hate-filled audiotapes to the outside world. That’s the result of the Bush-McCain approach to the war on terrorism.
BARACK OBAMA
speech, Jun. 18, 2008
One of the important lessons of September the 11th, 2001 is that our country must deal with gathering threats before they materialize, before they come back to haunt us. And that's what we did in Iraq.
GEORGE W. BUSH
Republican National Committee Presidential Gala, October 8, 2003
After more than four years of fighting, America continues its desperate struggle in Iraq without any concerted effort to devise a strategy that will achieve victory in that war torn country or in the greater conflict against extremism. From a catastrophically flawed, unrealistically optimistic war plan to the Administration's latest surge strategy, this Administration has failed to employ and -- and synchronize its political, economic, and military power. The latest revised strategy is a desperate attempt by the Administration that has not accepted the political and economic realities of this war and they have definitely not been able to communicate effectively that reality to the American people. An even worse and probably more disturbing assessment would be that America can not achieve the political consensus that is necessary to devise a grand strategy that will in fact synchronize and commit our national power to achieve victory.
LT. GEN. RICARDO S. SANCHEZ
speech in Arlington, VA, October 12, 2007
Liberating Iraq would be a cakewalk.
KEN ADELMAN
Washington Post, February 13, 2002
Do not yield. Do not flinch. Stand up. Stand up with our President and fight. We're Americans. We're Americans, and we'll never surrender. They will.
JOHN MCCAIN
speech, Aug. 30, 2004
It's the American public for whom the Iraq War is often no more real than a video game. Five years into this war, I am not always confident most Americans fully appreciate the caliber of the people fighting for them, the sacrifices they have made, and the sacrifices they continue to make.
EVAN WRIGHT
Generation Kill
States like these, and their terrorist allies, constitute an axis of evil, arming to threaten the peace of the world. By seeking weapons of mass destruction, these regimes pose a grave and growing danger. They could provide these arms to terrorists, giving them the means to match their hatred. They could attack our allies or attempt to blackmail the United States. In any of these cases, the price of indifference would be catastrophic.
GEORGE W. BUSH
State of the Union Address, January 29, 2002
The decision to leave [Iraq] should be based solely on the judgment of the combatant commanders on the ground who say, "My Iraqi counterparts can now handle this particular area of the country on their own with minimum American support or with no American support." When they can do that, we should leave.
DUNCAN HUNTER
Online NewsHour, Nov. 17, 2005
For the sake of protecting our friends and allies, the United States will lead a mighty coalition of freedom-loving nations and disarm Saddam Hussein. See, I can't imagine what was going through the mind of this enemy when they hit us. They probably thought the national religion was materialism, that we were so selfish and so self-absorbed that after 9/11/2001 this mighty nation would take a couple of steps back and file a lawsuit.
GEORGE W. BUSH
remarks by the President in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, November 1, 2002
Cronyism and corruption are major factors in Iraq's downward spiral.
PAUL KRUGMAN
"What Went Wrong", New York Times, April 23, 2004
I don't oppose all wars ... What I am opposed to is a dumb war ... A war based not on reason but on passion, not on principle but on politics.
BARACK OBAMA
speech, October 2, 2002
I'm glad you asked. It has nothing to do with oil, literally nothing to do with oil. It has nothing to do with the religion. People who have a viewpoint frequently throw up those two issues, and say, well, this is really against Muslims, which it certainly isn't. The United States is the country that went in and helped Kuwait, a Muslim country. We worked in Bosnia to stop ethnic cleansing. We've done Afghanistan. And it's certainly not about oil. Oil is fungible, and people who own it want to sell it, and it will be available.
DONALD RUMSFELD
interview on Infinity Radio, November 14, 2002