Any American who has spent time in Iraq or Afghanistan will tell you: the closer you get, the less certain you are of anything. If you are in Iraq, if you are in Afghanistan, everything is ambiguous. Everything is murky and gray and uncertain and possibly lethal.
Let’s be cautious about dreaming up extreme scenarios. The situation in Iraq is still salvageable.
There are two types of courage involved with what I did. When it comes to picking up a rifle, millions of people are capable of doing that, as we see in Iraq or Vietnam. But when it comes to risking their careers, or risking being invited to lunch by the establishment, it turns out that’s remarkably rare.
For us, the death of Osama bin Laden is a time of profound reflection. With his death, we remember and mourn all the lives lost on September 11. We remember and mourn all the lives lost in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan. We remember and mourn the death of our soldiers.
I think in national security, the war in Iraq is troublesome and a difficult challenge, but our troops and the military leaders we have are managing that situation, although it continues to be very risky and very dangerous.
I hope I’m wrong, but I am afraid that Iraq is going to turn out to be the greatest disaster in American foreign policy – worse than Vietnam, not in the number who died, but in terms of its unintended consequences and its reverberation throughout the region.
Iraq is part of a legitimate American effort not to have democracy everywhere but to have democracy somewhere.
Fomenting an ongoing political crisis is actually one of ISIS’s objectives; it distracts policymakers’ attention from terrorists inside Iraq; and it draws critical Iraqi security forces and law enforcement away from the front lines of the battle against ISIS.
Afghanistan remains an opportunity to deal al Qaeda a vital strategic blow, especially since we have abandoned all operations – including counterterrorism operations – in Iraq.
The Government of Iraq also owes a debt to the American and coalition forces who are fighting the insurgency and helping put that country back together after decades of repression.
My younger brother is a decorated combat veteran and was a platoon leader in Iraq.
A billion dollars every week for Iraq, $87 billion for Iraq. We can’t get $5 billion for childcare over five years in welfare reform.
We have a substantial number of countries that have pledged and provided all kinds of support for the United States in the event that war becomes necessary in Iraq.
We invaded Iraq to change a totalitarian, despotic regime, and we have been successful there.
I had several near death experiences or very, you know, close calls, if you may, in Iraq. You know, there was an incident where I was nearly kidnapped.
If we can spend over $3 trillion on the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, surely we can find the money to meet the long-term needs of our people.
Say what you want to say about the rest of his presidency, including his tone-deaf response to Katrina and a war waged in Iraq on false pretenses, Bush connected with Americans in the aftermath of 9/11 because he looked as frail and unforgiving as we felt.
Certainly our goal is to leave Iraq, but we can’t leave Iraq with our forces until we know that the Iraqi security forces are capable and efficient enough to defend the sovereignty of the nation.
I believe very deeply in the proposition that what we did in Iraq was the right thing to do. It was hard to do. It took a long time. There were significant costs involved.
Had we taken all of Iraq, we would have been like a dinosaur in the tar pit – we would still be there, and we, not the United Nations, would be bearing the costs of that occupation.
It’s now clear that from the very moment President Bush took office, Iraq was his highest priority as unfinished business from the first Bush Administration. His agenda was clear: find a rationale to get rid of Saddam.
No country in history ever sent mothers of toddlers off to fight enemy soldiers until the United States did this in the Iraq war.
With respect to Iraq, I did favour the continuity of American forces to work with the new Maliki government. They had enormous needs for intelligence, for training on everything from airplanes to more sophisticated ground equipment and the like.
Many Sunnis, who are still stuck in the Saddam era mindset and believe Iraq belongs to them, are trying to prevent a new country from developing at all.
Further, by acting decisively in Iraq, the United States has sent very strong signals to other nations that have been or could be terrorist sympathizers.
The truth was, there was never a connection between Iraq and Osama Bin Laden. There were no weapons of mass destruction, either.
I firmly believe that as voters come to learn more and more about John Kerry and learn more and more about his message that they’re going to want a President who is willing to address the fact that we didn’t have a post-war plan in Iraq.
The Iraq War was the first conflict in western history in which an imperialist war was massively protested against before it had even been launched.
Talk about national interests: When we went in with Operation Iraqi Freedom, some of our allies, Turkey, for example, would not let us through. How much trouble did that cause us, because we were not able to go into Iraq through Turkey?
I am encouraged by the news today that United States special operations personnel found, identified and killed the terrorist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the operational commander of the al-Qaeda led insurgency in Iraq. Al-Zarqawi was the public face of the insurgency.
In liberating Iraq, we have rid the nation and the rest of the world from the danger of Saddam Hussein.
To understand a difficult topic like Iraq takes patience and care. Unfortunately, you rarely hear a patient, careful or thoughtful discussion of intelligence these days.
Many soldiers returning from Iraq and Afghanistan suffer from serious, long-term, physical and mental health problems, due to their service. It is unconscionable to cut the already limited health care benefits available to these brave men and women.
The U.N. is much more than the case of Iraq.
I went to Iraq because I wanted to see what one year of occupation had done to Iraqi society, and I went to the West Bank and Gaza Strip because I wanted to see what three generations of occupation had done to Palestinian society. I found a lot more hopelessness and despair in Palestine.
Iraq will not allow any action on its soil that could harm the U.S. We don’t want any action from our soil to target our neighbors.
I think it is absolutely correct to solve the problem of terrorism in Iraq and Syria and Libya.
Saddam Hussein was undoubtedly a brutal dictator who had attacked Iraq’s neighbours, repressed and killed many of his own people, and was in violation of obligations imposed by the U.N. Security Council.
My personal missteps – how many Americans have died as a result of that? None. Other than my family, how many victims were there? None. And yet, in refusing to engage in a responsible debate about Iraq, how many Americans died? Thousands. And America seems to have no problem with that.
The scale of the U.K. effort in post-conflict Iraq never matched the scale of the challenge.
The liberation of Iraq was part of a broader effort to seriously confront the greatest threat to world security: rogue states capable of obtaining long range weapons of mass destruction.
The resolution has made a real threat of war go away and opens the way for further work in the interests of a political- diplomatic settlement of the situation around Iraq.
I was in a mountain biking accident and broke my sternum about three months before my unit was supposed to deploy to Iraq, and it’s such a close-knit community that the idea of not getting to go is hugely jarring, so I tried to get put back in training and wound up injuring it worse.
What people can survive and what they don’t survive is shocking to me. Someone can go to Iraq and be blown to bits and survive. Someone can trip and fall on the street and they die – that’s that.
A part of me was like, ‘Man, do I even like doing this anymore?’ That whole thing of ‘I’m in my 30s, and I sing and write songs while people are fighting wars in Iraq.’ You know? So everything had to have more meaning, and it couldn’t just be about making money. So, I took a minute.
As I think through the issue of funding the rebuilding of Iraq, I think about the analogy of a bankruptcy proceeding. There is no doubt that Iraq as a country is bankrupt.
One of the lessons of Vietnam, which we failed to heed in the Iraq war and the Afghanistan surge, is that before you commit U.S. military forces to aid or assist, it is essential to know what you want them to achieve.
We can no longer afford the war in Iraq. Our financial costs have already passed a third of a trillion dollars; the lifetime costs for this war, in both human and economic terms, will be borne by Americans for generations to come.
The reality in Iraq is that we are creating new terrorists and severely damaging the public impression of the United States in the Muslim world.
Well, what I’ve said is that the war in Iraq will always be clouded by how it began, which was a wrong premise, that there were in fact no weapons of nuclear – weapons of mass destruction.
