Disarming Iraq is legal under a series of U.N. resolutions. Iraq is in flagrant violation of U.N. Security Council resolutions.
I really am not going to get involved in a discussion about the legal position of the Iraq war. I am not the person to do that because I am not sufficiently impartial as a lawyer about this, because it’s a matter that is of interest to the person that I am closest to in the world.
There aren’t traditions of freedom in a place like Iraq. They’re going to have to come to grips with a concept that they hadn’t been allowed to conceive before.
The only one who thinks the world is safer since the occupation of Iraq is Bush.
We know that if al Queda or one of these terrorist organizations were to get a weapon of mass destruction from Iraq, that they would have no hesitation about using it to catastrophic consequences; the potential is for hundreds of thousands of casualties.
Mr. Speaker, in the years since we enacted our attack against Iraq, the threat from Iran has only grown more difficult, and our capacity to meet that threat actually has diminished. It is one of the reasons many of us opposed that action against Iraq.
Iraq is just a symbol of the attitude of western democracies to the rest of the world.
It is a kind of ego booster, the way Egypt’s winning the 1973 war, in the first stages, was an uplift. But I did not find when I spoke to people that the war in Iraq was seen as the major issue in American-Arab relations.
I like to tell people that I have the best job in the media. All I do is hang around with heroes. I do that every week for my ‘War Stories’ documentary series – and when FOX News wants – I go off and cover the young Americans we send to places like Afghanistan or Iraq.
Iraq is in a civil war. There is no road in that country that is safe.
America did not invade Iraq because Iraqis are Muslims. Oil, money, economic interests. Who knows? But it was not because Iraqis are Muslims.
But the key thing is that Iraq, while it’s got very large oil reserves, has marginalized itself as an oil exporter and these days its exports are only about one tenth that of neighboring Saudi Arabia.
I’ve traveled with Jack Murtha to Iraq three times to learn more about the region, talk with our diplomats and military leaders, and meet with our troops. Those visits are the main reason that I opposed the War in Iraq since its inception.
Is there an equality of power between America and Iraq? Definitely not; however, the Iraqi people are standing fast and are defending their land courageously.
We remain in Iraq because we know that sometimes liberty needs some nursing before it can grow on its own.
At the end of the Cold War, the prevailing view in Washington was that the U.S. was strong, and Russia was weak and did not count in a unipolar world. We disregarded Russia’s opposition to NATO expansion, the Iraq War, and the U.S.-led military intervention in Serbia for the independence of Kosovo.
One big, glaring difference I can think of between Iraq and Vietnam is the news coverage. During the Vietnam War era, you had TV coverage of the war saturating the airwaves every night, and that coverage wasn’t put through a military filter at all.
The Bush administration actually started out with an open mind towards Iran, by all indications. In fact, early in the administration, the White House tasked the various agencies of government to do an inter-agency review of Iran policy, as it did with Iraq policy and most of the big areas of the world.
Since coming back from Iraq, there’s been so many triumphs and obstacles standing in my way, so whenever I set my mind to something, I definitely just go full blast at it.
The presence of American troops is fueling the insurgency in Iraq, as acknowledged by General Casey and numerous other experts, and is helping terrorist recruiters build their numbers across the globe.
On big issues like war in Iraq, but in many other issues they simply must be multilateral. There’s no other way around. You have the instances like the global warming convention, the Kyoto protocol, when the U.S. went its own way.
This has a lot to do with the unrest in Nigeria, but also with the production loss after the hurricanes in the Gulf of Mexico, the decline in Iraq since the 2003 war, and the decline in Venezuelan output since 2002.
We have warned and continue to warn against calls for the division of Iraq, which come up now and then, calling for sectarian rights or minority freedoms.
I’m concerned about getting Iraq on its feet.
If the United States were to cut and run from Iraq, we would send a message of weakness that would embolden our terrorist enemies across the globe. A failed Iraq would destabilize the entire region and undermine U.S. national security for decades to come.
One of the sharp parallels is that neither Vietnam nor Iraq was the slightest threat to America’s national security.
We would like UN resolutions to be enforced, including on Iraq.
Iraq is not about oil.
United States and Coalition forces will remain in Iraq and will operate under American command as part of a multinational force authorized by the United Nations.
The central thesis of the American failure in Afghanistan – the one you’ll hear from politicians and pundits and even scholars – was succinctly propounded by Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage: ‘The war in Iraq drained resources from Afghanistan before things were under control’.
We are spending $1 billion a week in Iraq.
The people of Iraq have suffered greatly.
It is impossible to exaggerate the wide, and widening, gulf between the American attitude on the Iraq war and the view from our friends across the Atlantic.
I think President Obama has always been a little bit underestimated. Some of the things he’s done with foreign policy have been unassailable. Getting us out of Iraq, killing Osama Bin Laden.
I try to get over to Iraq and Afghanistan as much as I can.
I did try to write in Iraq, and I failed. I think you just don’t have the brain space for it.
Gen. Tommy Franks told me the war was being compromised as specialized personnel and equipment were being shifted from Afghanistan to prepare for the war in Iraq – a war more than a year away.
Al Qaeda is alive and well in Libya, Iraq, Syria and the wars are not receding.
The Canadian government continues to say they will not help us if we go to war with Iraq. However, the prime minister of Canada said he’d like to help, but he’s pretty sure that last time he checked, Canada had no army.
When I see the hatred exacted at Mr. Obama – you know, he lowered your taxes, killed your number one bad guy and got your guys out of Iraq – I don’t understand why he seems to inflame people so much. You know, unless, unless there’s a race problem.
Andrew Warren was a rarity in the CIA’s Clandestine Service – African-American, fluent in Arabic, and relatively young for an agent who’d already spent nearly a decade chasing terrorists in Afghanistan, Egypt, Iraq and Algeria, so deep undercover that few of his friends or family knew the nature of his work.
Iraq is a country that has been invaded. It’s not a failing state that you want to help. It’s a country that was functioning good or bad, with a horrible dictator, but you have invaded.
I have dealt with a pretty interesting mix of young people, many of whom have never been involved in any form of politics at any level who are interested in alternatives to austerity and debt, and older people who left the Labour party, mainly over Iraq, who are coming back in.
We know that there are unaccounted-for Scud and other ballistic missiles in Iraq. And part of the problem is that, since 1998, there has been no way to even get minimal information about those programs except through intelligence means.
We do not agree that hindsight is required. The risks of internal strife in Iraq, active Iranian pursuit of its interests, regional instability, and al-Qaeda activity in Iraq, were each explicitly identified before the invasion.
Saddam’s goal is to achieve the lifting of U.N. sanctions while retaining and enhancing Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction programs. We cannot, we must not and we will not let him succeed.
It’s clear to me now that we’ve got to reach out to the Arab Sunni community in particular in an effort to cause some moderate political activity to take place so they join the future of Iraq.
Iraq assumes responsibility for its own future… They have got to step up.
There are patriots who opposed the war in Iraq and there are patriots who supported the war in Iraq. We are one people, all of us pledging allegiance to the stars and stripes, all of us defending the United States of America.
I pray that this council, which will probably be too late to save Iraq, will do what it can, which will be immeasurably strong in what it does in trying to save our democracy.
This trend of reporting process over substance is unfortunate, if omnipresent. Even worse is the media’s inability – or unwillingness – to fact-check Republicans who are angry about the Democrats trying to debate and vote on Iraq policy.
The U.S. is friends with dictatorial regimes, then invades places like Iraq and Afghanistan, and what happens afterwards is a catastrophe. In the place of their leaders, fundamentalist movements that use the name of Islam spring up, and all that’s left is terror and bloodshed.
