Top 44 Baghdad Quotes

It’s so jarring to go from Baghdad to Cambridge, to go from a place where people are fighting and striving and dying to a place where the biggest concern is what kind of cheese to put in your sandwich.

By the fall of 2007, my last remaining Iraqi friend in Baghdad had left. Once he was gone, my connection to the country and the war began to thin, even as the terror diminished. I missed the improvement that came with the surge, and so, in my nervous system, I never quite registered it.

The U.S. is not constructing a palatial embassy, by far the largest in the world and virtually a separate city within Baghdad, and pouring money into military bases, with the intention of leaving Iraq to Iraqis.

Almost immediately, I remember right when Tikrit even fell, a few days after Baghdad fell, there was talks of insurgency, there was talks of jihad and of resisting the American occupiers, and slowly this turned into an organized movement.

In late 2009, I returned to Baghdad after a lengthy absence. I was living alone, in the Hamra Hotel, the twice bombed-out de facto international news bureau.

Baghdad is determined to force the Mongols of our age to commit suicide at its gates.

There are no American infidels in Baghdad. Never!

That is why we wholeheartedly support the American-led effort to free the people of Iraq. And though we are a small country with a small military, we are proud to stand side by side with our allies in the fight to end the reign of terror in Baghdad.

There are people in Baghdad pursuing the initiative that I started, and I want to give them every chance of success. I don’t want to provide any distractions.

But all that having been said, you can’t, in a city of a million people like Karbala, or 5 million like Baghdad, you can’t be in all places at all times.

I left Kurdistan in April 2003 with the peshmerga, following their excited advance as Saddam’s forces crumbled. First Kirkuk, then Mosul – where looters broke into the city museum and seized its Parthian sculptures – then Tikrit. I reported from Baghdad in month-long stints until the end of 2004.

The mission statement was ordered, and it sent the 800th MP Brigade, effective the first of July, up to Baghdad. I joined my brigade to take command at the end of June.

If one’s memories of Baghdad women were only of those to be seen in the streets, they would be of leathery, wrinkled faces, prematurely old, figures which have lost all shape, and henna-stained hands crinkled and deformed by toil.

You take one bomber and deploy him in Baghdad, and another is manufactured in Riyadh the next day. It’s exactly like when you take the toy off the shelf at Wal-Mart and another is made in Shen Zhen the next day.

Terrorists bombard complete cities, such as Fallujah, Baghdad, innocent women and children.

Baghdad is altogether built of chrome-yellow kiln-dried bricks.

They’re not even within 100 miles of Baghdad. They are not in any place. They hold no place in Iraq. This is an illusion… they are trying to sell to the others an illusion.

I was with the 101st Airborne Division in Iraq, really in the middle of nowhere, about 80 miles south of Baghdad. And it was almost midnight, and I got a computer message from the home office of the Washington Post asking me to call them. I did call them and was told that I’d won the Pulitzer Prize.

They do believe that if we do not wage this war against terror in places like Baghdad and Kabul, we are more likely to have it waged in Baltimore and Kansas.

Prime Minister Maliki, released from American restraint, acted on his worst instincts, creating enormous distrust in Iraq’s Kurdish population and deeply embittering Sunnis in western Iraq’s Al Anbar, who lost any confidence in a Baghdad government they saw as adversarial.

I miss aspects of being in the Arab world – the language – and there is a tranquility in these cities with great rivers. Whether it’s Cairo or Baghdad, you sit there and you think, ‘This river has flown here for thousands of years.’ There are magical moments in these places.

I think unleashing 3,000 smart bombs against the city of Baghdad in the first several days of the war… to me, if those were unleashed against the San Francisco Bay Area, I would call that an act of extreme terrorism.

Before our kids start coming home from Iraq in body bags and women and children start dying in Baghdad, I need to know, what did Iraq do to us?

I considered myself very lucky after ‘Baghdad Cafe,’ and I have ‘The Shield.’ In every genre, I’ve kicked butt at some point. I’m real happy.

Enclosed by a sand berm four miles around and 160 feet high, the Baghdad Nuclear Research Facility entombs what remains of reactors bombed by Israel in 1981 and the United States in 1991. It has stored industrial and medical wastes, along with spent reactor fuel.

The American surge of combat forces into Baghdad that was ordered by President Bush worked. And there was a calm, a relative calm that descended on the country kind of late 2008. That pretty much held until the last American combat soldiers left at the end of 2011.

These poor kids in Baghdad have no running water, no showers. They wipe with baby wipes. My heart goes out to them.

Today’s message to Baghdad is very clear: the UN Security Council resolution expresses the unity and determination of the entire international community to assume its collective responsibility.

The fact is that as soon as they reach Baghdad gates, we will besiege them and slaughter them. Until now they have refused to do battle with us. They are just going places. One can describe them as a boa: when it feels threatened, it runs to somewhere else.

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.

The first time I met President Obama was 2006 in Baghdad. He was the senator from Illinois; it was a month before he actually ended up declaring. He had to come to Baghdad to kind of check that box, and I was the correspondent for ‘Newsweek’ at the time.

If we can rebuild Iraq, we can rebuild Illinois and Indiana and if we can do Baghdad, we can do Baltimore.

All of Vegas is false. There’s a false Paris, a false Venice, a false Baghdad – in fact, all of the early Vegas aesthetic is Baghdad, which is also the irony. It’s ‘Aladdin,’ the sands, ‘One Thousand and One Nights.’

Shortly after we arrived in Baghdad, we had another conversation with the ambassador. He said that he wanted us to give him the timeline, because we had 90 days to get these prisons operational and transfer responsibility back to the Iraqis.

As a nation, Kuwait has been, arguably, free of freedom itself. Claimed in turn by Constantinople, Riyadh, and Baghdad, Kuwait has survived by playing Turks off Persians, Arabs off one another, and the English off everyone.

Yesterday, the Pentagon warned U.S. reporters that they should get out of Baghdad as soon as possible because the U.S. could attack at any time. Then the Pentagon added, ‘Whatever you do, don’t tell Geraldo.’

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.

My dad’s Israeli. He was born in Baghdad to Iraqi Jews. Then, at age two, his parents wanted to move to their homeland and he grew up in Israel. I’ve been there twice, once as a baby and once when I was 15.

In the age of the internet when everybody’s a pundit, we’re still gonna need somebody there to go talk to the colonels, to be on the ground in Baghdad and stuff and that’s very expensive.

My dad was working abroad, in Iraq, and he was a doctor. We used to go and visit him, in Baghdad, off and on. For the first ten years of my life, we used to go backwards and forwards to Baghdad, so that was quite amazing. I spent a lot of time traveling around the Middle East.

There has come into being a kind of a Shia belt from Tehran through Baghdad to Beirut. And this gives Iran the opportunity to reconstruct the ancient Persian Empire – this time under the Shia label.

Prime Minister Menachem Begin ordered the destruction of an Iraqi nuclear reactor near Baghdad in 1981. This action delayed an Iraqi bomb by at least 15 years. The whole world condemned Israel – only to realize later how farsighted it had been.

Well, I’ve been to Iraq twice now. I was in Baghdad in June and then north of Baghdad in November.

That was not part of the U.N. resolution; it was not part of the mandate to go on to Baghdad and, frankly, if we had gone into Baghdad and pushed Saddam Hussein off, we would have inherited an even bigger mess than the mess we inherited with the refugee problem.