I don’t think Iraq could be transformed overnight into a democracy. How can you take a country that doesn’t have any kind of tradition of democracy, where its people have been brutalized and repressed for decades, and suddenly impose Jeffersonian ideals?
There was unprecedented elite condemnation of the plans to invade Iraq. Sensible analysts were able to perceive that the enterprise carried significant risks for U.S. interests, however conceived.
To try to turn Iraq into a liberal democracy is absolutely crazy. Islam has no understanding of the separation between church and state because they don’t understand Islam to be a church.
The ‘Axis of Evil’ was – and is – very real, as the tyrants of Iran, Iraq, and North Korea knew full well.
If you are Iraqi, you know who I am… and you know that I do not tire. I am the president of Iraq and I refuse to answer these questions because this court is illegitimate.
The kind of Iraq that emerges from all of this is ultimately out of our hands.
Democrats are committed to mapping a new direction in Iraq, and we will work with the President and the new Defense Secretary to ensure that the will of the American people guides our future actions.
As we have heard, the end of al-Zarqawi is a significant blow to al-Qaida operations in Iraq. It is another clear indication of the progress we are making.
When Rumsfeld gets up on television and says we have definitive intelligence that al Qaeda is working with Iraq, how is an ordinary citizen supposed to react? They won’t tell you the evidence, and when anyone asks, they say, ‘Well, you know: It’s secret.’
The only way the French are going in is if we tell them we found truffles in Iraq.
Our top priority is our troops, who are making the extraordinary effort to fulfill the mission they have been given. Democrats will work with this Administration to better define that mission and a realistic expectation of success in Iraq.
The United States did not act in Iraq in 1988 when gas was being used on the Kurds or when gas was used in the Iranian-Iraq War.
It is part of my responsibility as a bridge builder to speak the truth about what’s great about America, what we’ve done right, and what our less glorious moments. And many people feel that the Iraq adventure, for example, has been one of our less glorious moments.
I also argued before the war that the administration was underestimating Arab nationalism and Iraqi nationalism, that it was not going to be as easy to rule Iraq as they thought.
The war in Iraq, clearly has not turned out in the way that was hoped.
Rather, it is through conciliation and compromise that we are building a fair Iraq, a just state for all its peoples.
It’s an amazing thing to hear they’re finally giving out a Medal of Honor to a soldier from the wars of Iraq and Afghanistan.
While this debate today is a belated effort to inform the American people, it is nevertheless an empty gesture. It is time to admit our mistake in Iraq and begin to bring our troops home with honor.
We can’t have a failure in Iraq, but we also can’t be there for the next 10 years because if we are, it’s going to become, I think, a failure in and of itself.
Savage, despicable evil. That’s what we were fighting in Iraq. That’s why a lot of people, myself included, called the enemy ‘savages.’ There really was no other way to describe what we encountered there.
I’m very proud of the fact that I voted against the Iraq war. And proud that I voted strongly not for students to be saddled with thousands and thousands of pounds worth of debt.
I would love to see the French spending money to restore Iraq.
I always wrote – not about war, necessarily, but I always wrote stories. I tried to write while I was in Iraq. It’s not really – I didn’t do a very good job, and not about war.
With every story that TV covers, somebody – some corporation, some shareholders – are making money. That’s true whether covering Libya, Iraq, the tsunami in Japan, Osama bin Laden, whatever story there is. That day, the shareholders are making money off it. Every newspaper that’s sold, somebody’s making a dime.
If a senator calls me up and asks me what should we do in Iraq, I’m happy to talk to him.
There’s a lot of revisionist history that goes on these days about Iraq.
The liberation of Iraq is a crucial advance in the campaign against terror.
Both Iraq and Syria are a fissile mixture of ethnicities and religions thrown together after Versailles by departing French and British imperialists and only kept together by Baathist tyranny and violence.
We are ready to sacrifice our souls, our children and our families so as not to give up Iraq. We say this so no one will think that America is capable of breaking the will of the Iraqis with its weapons.
In July of 2004, I came out strongly against the war with Iraq because it was going to destabilize the Middle East.
The ongoing strife in Iraq, and the billions of dollars that the President is seeking to continue that war, give me little comfort that this Administration has learned from its mistakes in Iraq.
We’ve persevered because of a belief we share with the Iraqi people – a belief that out of the ashes of war, a new beginning could be born in this cradle of civilization. Through this remarkable chapter in the history of the United States and Iraq, we have met our responsibility. Now, it’s time to turn the page.
Well, I’ve been to Iraq twice now. I was in Baghdad in June and then north of Baghdad in November.
Instead, we did take our eye off the ball. We decided, instead of finishing the job in Afghanistan, to go into Iraq. And today, unfortunately, if you look at the situation on the ground, it is a mess.
Mattis has been sharply critical of President Barack Obama’s policies on Iran and Obama’s capping of troop numbers and campaign end-dates in theaters of war such as Afghanistan and Iraq. Mattis also appears to be a skeptic of the Obama-era policy of putting women into combat roles.
Will we fight or will we retreat? That is the question that is posed to us. Some of my friends on the other side of the aisle often refer to Iraq as a distraction.
‘The war in Iraq – if Osama was a Christian – it’s the Christmas present he never would have expected.
Iraq did not spontaneously opt for disarmament. They did it as part of a ceasefire, so they were forced to do it, otherwise the war might have gone on. So the motivation has been very different.
One can’t doubt that the American objective in Iraq has failed – different plans have to be made. And the kernel here is the acknowledgement of defeat.
I met with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in Israel, visited our allies in the Arab Gulf, traveled to Tunisia and Iraq, met with President Petro Poroshenko in Ukraine, and visited our allies in Germany, France, and the United Kingdom.
I was kidnapped by Sunni insurgents near Fallujah, in Iraq, ambushed by the Taliban in the Korengal Valley in Afghanistan, and injured in a car accident that killed my driver while covering the Taliban occupation of the Swat Valley in Pakistan.
It is now conventional wisdom that Americans do not care why we went to war in Iraq, that it is enough that the world is better off without Saddam Hussein.
I have no idea what the U.S. intends to do further there and what would be the reaction of the Iraqi people. I only know that the sole option is to leave Iraq to the Iraqi people.
To be able to live and train in Iraq under these circumstances you need to be brave.
If a person is a U.S. citizen, and he is on the battlefield in Afghanistan or Iraq trying to attack our troops, he will face the full brunt of the U.S. military response.
The face of terrorism in Iraq is dead. Abu Musab al Zarqawi brutalized, tortured, and killed thousands of innocent people, forcing Iraqis to live in fear. The Iraqi people finally had enough, and gave up his whereabouts to the Iraqi security forces.
The rise of ISIS in Iraq and Syria has been a disaster for the public image of Islam – and a boon for the Islamophobia industry.
And now when we hear that Iran and Iraq plan to cooperate more closely and that a fundamentalist is coming to power in Tehran – a man about whom we cannot be sure that he is absolutely averse to terrorism – it is very worrisome.
Leaving Iraq without military assistance during its transition, and before it is stable enough to ensure its own citizens’ security, would pose a tremendous risk. We must complete our mission.
If today is your typical day in America, 80 of our fellow citizens will die from gunfire. In the last two weeks, more Americans have died from gunfire here at home in the United States than in the entire war in Iraq since it started.
Someone earlier made a remark about losing 500 soldiers and 2,200 wounded in Iraq. Those soldiers were sent there by the vote of Sen. Lieberman, Sen. Edwards and Sen. Kerry. I think that is a serious matter.
Armed drones have become Barack Obama’s way to engage in terrorist-infested hellholes without putting ‘boots on the ground.’ For years, the CIA has been running a secrecy-shrouded program of targeted killings in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Yemen, and more recently in Somalia, Syria and Iraq.
Mistakes, after all, are endemic to foreign and military policy given the unpredictability of events and the difficulty of securing reliable information in a place like Iraq.
