What is postwar Iraq going to look like, with the Kurds and the Sunnis and the Shiites? That’s a huge question, to my mind.
I saw so many radically different versions of Iraq. It would have been difficult for me to come back and think, ‘This is the Iraq experience.’
Do you know Afghan children wear shoes when they sleep, so they can run easily if a bomb falls during the night? Iraq has been similarly pushed against the wall. What proof did the West ultimately have, what justification for raining bombs on them?
The president welcomes peaceful protests – it is a time-honored tradition. The president agrees violence is not the answer in Iraq, and that’s why he hopes Saddam Hussein will disarm.
We ought to recognize that we have an offensive responsibility to take the war to the terrorists where they are. That responsibility has waned in the last year as military and intelligence resources were withdrawn from Afghanistan and Pakistan to be used in Iraq.
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.
Everybody has a job to do. There are people in Iraq on both sides of this war who do what they do for religious reasons, and they feel with God on their side. Some people are good at annihilating people. Maybe that’s their gift.
Why do the President and Vice-President constantly change the subject when asked to explain why things are going so badly in Iraq? The answer is simple. They have been consistently wrong about Iraq, and the results speak for themselves.
The U.S. Forces are winning in Iraq. It is to be hoped that they will win at home also.
Last year I traveled to the Middle East to visit with troops in Kuwait, Iraq, and Afghanistan.
Russia does not have in its possession any trustworthy data that supports the existence of nuclear weapons or any weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and we have not received any such information from our partners as yet.
For decades, Saddam and his Sunni minority had imposed their will on Iraq, carrying on a 14-century tradition of Sunnis controlling Mesopotamia despite a Shiite majority.
The most dangerous thing Iraq could have ever had was a nuclear weapon. The nuclear weapon Iraq was trying to build was not deliverable by bomb or ballistic missile. It was a large, bulky device that they hoped to bury and set off to let the world know they had a nuclear weapon. They never achieved that.
The steep decline in America’s image and standing after 9/11 is a direct reflection of global distaste for the instruments of American hard power: the Iraq invasion, Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, torture, rendition, Blackwater’s killings of Iraqi civilians.
Not all the Americans in Iraq are those who torture and murder, or course they’re not, I don’t know how many are doing it, I know it is systematic throughout the United States military I think that’s been revealed.
The Bush administration also was not straightforward about the intelligence it had, releasing tenuous information that fit its goal of attacking Iraq. I feel deceived.
What President Bush did in his doctrine of preemptive strike and in his war in Afghanistan and in Iraq was to turn even his allies in Europe negatively toward America.
The once all-powerful ruler of Iraq was found in a hole, and now sits in a prison cell.
It was essentially for self defence that we went to war in Afghanistan and would go to war in Iraq.
Those people who want to express their religious beliefs on public property should enjoy the same rights that we provide to those protesting the war in Iraq.
The president led us into the Iraq war on the basis of unproven assertions without evidence; he embraced a radical doctrine of pre-emptive war unprecedented in our history; and he failed to build a true international coalition.
In November, they transferred control of Abu Ghraib to the military intelligence command completely; it was, after all, the center for interrogations for Iraq.
According to recent opinion polls, a large majority of Iraqis believe that the U.S. military has no intention to leave Iraq, and that it would stay even is asked by the Iraqi government to leave.
We can be proud of our record as an international beacon of liberty. From fostering democracies in Eastern Europe to the stabilization of Iraq and Afghanistan, we have been true to that calling and helped spread freedom to oppressed peoples everywhere.
Tonight, I concurred with President Bush when he stated that the decisions on future involvement of U.S. troops in Iraq should be left to the Pentagon and not politicians in Washington.
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.
The Cold War, Bosnia and Ukraine remind us that peace is fragile. Iraq and Syria remind us that no society or culture is immune from conflict.
Consumerism diverts us from thinking about women’s rights, it stops us from thinking about Iraq, it stops us from thinking about what’s going on in Africa – it stops us from thinking in general.
I don’t think for a minute we went to Iraq for oil. It just so happened that it had oil. But I think we’ll come out of the Iraqi situation with a call on their oil at market price.
Iraq is going to go down as one of the greatest blunders in American history.
The concern is that Iraq could actually ultimately defeat ISIS, but Iran will have taken over the country, because it will be their military, their boots on the ground controlling the ground.
We are today, in this country, convulsed by the situation in Iraq. It is an extraordinary crisis. It is taxing our men and women in uniform, and it is certainly taxing our resolve.
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.
The new Congress needs to move quickly to strengthen the Army and Marines – not to send more troops to Iraq – but to rebuild our capacity to meet national security threats globally.
I think of all the guys that strap a gun on their backs and head to Afghanistan and Iraq to keep us free and safe and maintain what America has stood for.
As far as Iraq, the important thing is that the Taliban is gone in Afghanistan, three-quarters of the al-Qaida leadership is either dead or in jail, and we now have Saudi Arabia working with us, Pakistan working with us.
Iraq is better without Saddam Hussein than with Saddam Hussein. Without a doubt.
We went into Iraq because Iraq posed a threat to the stability of the region and was engaged in the process of trying to develop weapons of mass destruction and had links to terrorists.
Since the election, since the formation of a government, the death in Iraq has increased. The United States stands by, helpless to do anything about it. That’s the reality, not George Bush’s revisionist history!
I can’t accept collective responsibility for the decision to commit Britain now to military action in Iraq without international agreement or domestic support.
Dishonesty is Trump’s hallmark: He claimed that he had spoken clearly and boldly against going into Iraq. Wrong. He spoke in favor of invading Iraq. He said he saw thousands of Muslims in New Jersey celebrating 9/11. Wrong. He saw no such thing. He imagined it.
Let me be clear, Mr. President, mistakes have been made in Iraq. And this operation has been far from perfect as evidenced by the fact that Zarqawi and other terrorists continue to wreak havoc throughout Iraq.
America must continue diplomacy, even as we continue the war, to expand the coalition of the willing to share the burden of war and to share the responsibility and the economic cost of rebuilding Iraq.
What I did warn about when I testified in front of Congress in 2002, I said if you want to worry about a state, it shouldn’t be Iraq, it should be Iran. But this government, our administration, wanted to worry about Iraq, not Iran.
Sen. Edward Kennedy knows very directly. Senator Kennedy and I talked on several occasions prior to the war that my view was that the best evidence that I had seen was that Iraq indeed had weapons of mass destruction.
A lot of folks are still demanding more evidence before they actually consider Iraq a threat. For example, France wants more evidence. And you know I’m thinking, the last time France wanted more evidence they rolled right through Paris with the German flag.
Both Presidents George Bush and Barack Obama pursued policies of regime change after 9/11 – with Bush removing al-Qaida’s safe haven in Afghanistan and the sadistic anti-American dictator Saddam Hussein in Iraq – but Obama took it a step further and disregarded regional stability as a guiding factor for U.S. policy.
We’ve thrown out Saddam and Saddam, dead or alive, is finished in Iraq.
Our armed forces will fight for peace in Iraq, a peace built on more secure foundations than are found today in the Middle East. Even more important, they will fight for two human conditions of even greater value than peace: liberty and justice.
Victory is the most important aspect in Iraq, because victory in Iraq will help us have victory in the War on Terror.
It’s very strange getting out of the military, when you’ve lived in Iraq, and people you know are going overseas again and again. Some of them are getting injured.
