Every year, millions of people from Iran and Iraq travel to each other’s countries, and we also have marriages between Iraqis and Iranians. Many Iranians were born in Iraq, and many Iraqis were born in Iran. This is a kind of special, cordial amicable ties.
I took a trip in 2004, a year after the war started in Iraq. I played music on the streets of Baghdad for Iraqi civilians. I’d also play for U.S. soldiers at night when they were off duty in the bars. Then I would talk to people, and I would film them and ask them about their life and the conflict.
Insurgents have capitalized on popular resentment and anger towards the United States and the Iraqi government to build their own political, financial and military support, and the faith of Iraqi citizens in their new government has been severely undermined.
The new troops in Iraq need to be Iraqi troops.
The Iraqis have once again failed to meet a deadline for a final draft of the constitution.
I argued that the Bush administration, and the Coalition officials more recently, didn’t understand Iraqi society. They thought it was a blank slate, that they could use Iraqis as guinea pigs.
Last month, the Iraqi people went to the polls, voting in their first free election in more than 50 years.
Are Iraqis ready to carry the responsibility for their country? Is Iraq ready to be its own master? We want to be the masters of ourselves and to carry our responsibilities in this region.
With no other security forces on hand, U.S. military was left to confront, almost alone, an Iraqi insurgency and a crime rate that grew worse throughout the year, waged in part by soldiers of the disbanded army and in part by criminals who were released from prison.
It is important that the Iraqi people have confidence in the election results and that the voting process, including the process for vote counting, is free and fair.
That the Iraqi Government is considering a political deal granting amnesty to insurgents who have attacked or killed American service members is not just shocking – the idea of amnesty for insurgents is an outrage.
We all know that, unfortunately, the media does not always portray the good things that are happening in Iraq and Afghanistan, and this will be a great opportunity for us to glean some information from the Iraqi women who are here for us to also take back to our constituents.
Today is a celebration of hope for the Iraqi people. The Iraqi people can now take control of their government and their future by creating a society that protects the rights endowed to us by our creator – life, liberty and freedom.
There should be no place for terrorism and extremist ideas in post-ISIS Iraq. We must join forces in building our country; we must contribute together to achieve security, stability, and prosperity for the benefit of all Iraqis.
While the war in Iraq was raging, I spent some time in neighbouring Jordan, meeting with Iraqi refugees who fled their country to try to find some place of safety. I interviewed many families about what had happened to them and what they did as a result.
As co-chair of the Iraqi Women’s Caucus in the House, I’ve enjoyed the opportunity to collaborate with and hear from Iraqi women elected to serve in the new National Assembly.
There are 40,000 Iraqi police on duty around the country. If they detect an attack about to happen, the police are the ones who are supposed to stop it.
The men and women of our armed forces played an instrumental role in the election process – securing polling sites and providing security – that allowed so many Iraqis the opportunity to vote freely for the first time ever.
Daesh thought it could exploit the vulnerability of the Iraqi state, but it underestimated the overwhelming desire of the Iraqi people for unity.
The Iraqi people are some of the warmest people you’ll meet in your life. They are extremely receptive to strangers. Their hospitality is immense.
As Turkish entrepreneurs perform well in Iraq, the Iraqis will have more confidence in Turkish contractors than in some European company they do not know.
Iraqis have held elections and have recently put together their government, all encouraging developments.
And we are grateful to the American young men and women who are risking their lives to give the Iraqi people this chance, this dream of democracy in Iraq now.
They have called Operation Iraqi Freedom a war of choice that isn’t part of the real war on terror. Someone should tell that to al Qaeda.
The UN could help the Iraqi government get on its feet and help the United States withdraw a bit more.
You know me… If you are Iraqi, you know me.
We can all be proud of our men and women in the military who are following their orders, carrying out their missions and sacrificing so much to give the Iraqi people a chance for a more peaceful and prosperous future.
The United States was seriously defeated in Iraq by Iraqi nationalism – mostly by nonviolent resistance. The United States could kill the insurgents, but they couldn’t deal with half a million people demonstrating in the streets.
History will eventually depict as legitimate the efforts of the Iraqi resistance to destabilise and defeat the American occupation forces and their imposed Iraqi collaborationist government.
Saddam Hussein has been brutal against his people, but when he was committing those crimes, the international community did not come to the rescue of the Iraqis.
As I have been saying for more than a year now, turning this vital mission over to the Iraqi people as soon as possible should remain a topic of debate for Congress while relying on our military commanders to set up the timetable.
When I was dealing with a lot of Iraqis, lies were constant; people constantly lied to you. It’s a part of their culture. They wanted to please you so much, they were willing to lie to you to please you.
We have exhausted all of our diplomatic effort to get the Iraqis to comply with their own agreements and with international law. Given that… we have got to force them to comply, and we are doing so militarily.
The transfer is a monumental occasion as the Iraqi people take control of their government and their future and forge ahead with creating a society governed by the tenets of life, liberty and freedom.
Despite the negativity coming from the President’s opponents, the United States remains fully committed to assisting the Iraqis in restoring security and rebuilding their nation.
Well, we won the war. You know what that means. In twenty years, we’ll all be driving Iraqi cars.
There are a lot of Iraqi people we can never pay back for what we’ve done.
The training and equipping of Iraqi security forces should be accelerated.
Some Iraqi troops aren’t willing to fight for their government. But many Shiites appear willing to fight for their religious leaders.
Human-rights advocates, for example, claim that the mistreatment of Iraqi prisoners is of a piece with President Bush’s 2002 decision to deny al Qaeda and Taliban fighters the legal status of prisoners of war under the Geneva Conventions.
The Iraqi military are able to deploy these weapons within 45 minutes of a decision to do so.
I dare say there may be some men and women in the Armed Forces who are so decent that they would say: Give the Iraqi people money, we do not want to be paid back. That is the strength of our country.
But the key shift in focus will be from counter-insurgency operations to more and more cooperation with Iraqi security forces and to building Iraqi security capacity.
Our own State Department polls say that 80 percent of Iraqis view the United States as an unpopular occupier.
Well, Mr. Speaker, if so many of these Iraqis are ready to come up and to provide the security, the police work in the country, then surely there should be no problem with putting American forces into the background instead of having them up front.
America is a friend to the people of Iraq. Our demands are directed only at the regime that enslaves them and threatens us. When these demands are met, the first and greatest benefit will come to Iraqi men, women and children.
We are ready to train new Iraqi forces outside Iraq. We did it in Abu Dhabi.
The U.S. and Iraq will work together next year to shift Iraqi resources from unproductive subsidies to productive uses that enable Iraqis to earn livelihoods.
A large majority of Americans believe that the U.N., not the U.S., should take the lead in working with Iraqis to transfer authentic sovereignty as well as in economic reconstruction and maintaining civic order.
The Iraqis are not threatened by the Turks or by the Iranians or by the Saudis and they tell me that these are not weapons of mass destruction, they are weapons of self-destruction.
The Iraqi elections were an important first step.
President Bush says he is concerned about the Iraqi people, but if Iraqi people are dying in numbers, then American policy will be challenged very strongly.
The Iraqi government will try and retake some of the cities have that been captured by ISIS. That means the Shiite government dropping bombs on civilian areas, on Sunni cities. There will likely be a response with car bombings here in Baghdad, and this could be a long fight.
That policy was abandoned very quickly, and the military police were tagged with the responsibility of conducting training, which they did. We were not equipped or set up with personnel to recruit new Iraqi guards.
