We’re in danger of breaking our army and preventing our national leaders from having the flexibility to confront not just Iraq and Afghanistan, but crises around the globe.
The Washington leadership has put aside non-proliferation programmes and devoted its energies and resources to driving the country to war by extraordinary deceit, then trying to manage the catastrophe it created in Iraq.
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.
Bush’s war in Iraq has done untold damage to the United States. It has impaired our military power and undermined the morale of our armed forces. Our troops were trained to project overwhelming power. They were not trained for occupation duties.
In the years since 9/11, more terrorists have been created through this President’s policies than were captured or killed. There weren’t any terrorists in Iraq in 2003, but there are now.
This is the year of Katrina and Iraq. How the war ends is more important than how it began. However you feel about the war, you have to be compassionate and loving towards our troops.
It took the Gulf War to demonstrate that America did want more than one friend in the Mideast, and also was willing to take and make major risks to prevent a small Muslim country, Kuwait, from being overrun and in effect stolen by Iraq.
If we don’t have accurate information, if we are not able to tell difficult truth one to another, we will never be able to effectively design a policy for Iraq.
The Minnesotans I talk to are really concerned about what the future holds for their families. They’re trying to pay for health care and send their kids to college, they’re worried about declining home values, they’re scared for a loved one they have serving in Iraq.
I can’t tell you if the use of force in Iraq today will last five days, five weeks or five months, but it won’t last any longer than that.
Iraq is a small but very proud nation.
It’s hard for people sometimes to relate to me. They weren’t in the military, they weren’t injured overseas in Iraq, they weren’t burned, they didn’t go through 33 surgeries, or two and a half years in the hospital.
Whatever the final outcome in Iraq, our men and women in uniform should stand tall with pride for a job well done. It was our political leaders – of both parties and both presidencies – who failed us.
American POWs from the last Iraq war, who were held prisoner and tortured by Iraq, are now being prevented by our government from suing the Iraqis who tortured them.
It’s not just Iraq – it’s the Atlantic partnership which is at stake.
Well, that our main concern is that Iraq should not become a divided country.
The tyrant has fallen, and Iraq is free.
The best power of all is to be free, but Obama is not a free person. He is a prisoner of a military system. He talked about closing Guantanamo and ending the war in Iraq. Now he’s taken on another war. What’s happening?
But the central point is that any campaign against Iraq, whatever the strategy, cost and risks, is certain to divert us for some indefinite period from our war on terrorism.
I consider that 9/11 was the day when war was started against my own work and against myself. Even though we are not sure of the links, Iraq was one of the countries that did not lower its flags in mourning on 9/11.
The effort to blur the lines between Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib reflects a deep misunderstanding about the different legal regimes that apply to Iraq and the war against al Qaeda.
Did you know that they introduced the 15 percent flat tax on individual and corporate income in Iraq? Something that some politicians very much wanted to push in the United States without success but in Iraq they do it.
The government of the United States doesn’t want peace. It wants to exploit its system of exploitation, of pillage, of hegemony through war. It wants peace, but what’s happening in Iraq? What happened in Lebanon? Palestine? What’s happening? What’s happened over the last hundred years in Latin America and in the world?
During the Gulf War, I remember two little third grade girls saying to me – after I read them some poems by writers in Iraq – ‘You know, we never thought about there being children in Iraq before.’ And I thought, ‘Well those poems did their job, because now they’ll think about everything a little bit differently.’
The rise of ISIS in Iraq is a wider threat to the stability of the Middle East and the West than many realise.
And we’ve also had now the speaker of the Parliament in Iraq using blatantly anti-Semitic remarks, saying the Jews and sons of Jews are the problem of all the violence that’s in Iraq.
How long will it take the citizens of the United States, one wonders, to recognize that the house their country bombed in Iraq is the same one they were living in until it was foreclosed?
For no good reason, George W. Bush and the best and brightest he could muster, including the likes of Paul Bremer and Paul Wolfowitz, decided it made sense to attack Iraq.
This will be Iraq for all without discrimination among Iraqi citizens, or ethnic or sectarian discrimination.
I have never believed you go to war in Iraq, you go to war in Afghanistan, and believe that you can deal with those battlefields, those countries, in microcosms, or narrow channels.
Saddam’s ouster will not necessarily lead to the same result, since Iraq lacks democratic traditions. Democracy doesn’t just consist of holding elections.
Long-term, we must figure out a way that the Kurdish territory within Iraq operates with a certain amount of autonomy so that they feel comfortable and safe going back.
When I was growing up in Iraq, there was an unbroken belief in progress and a great sense of optimism. It was a moment of nation building.
No military timetable should compel war when a successful outcome, namely a disarmed Iraq may be feasible without war, for example by allowing more time to the UN inspectors.
George W. Bush and Tony Blair had to convince the world that Saddam Hussein represented an imminent threat. Tony Blair lied when he claimed that Iraq could launch a chemical or biological attack within 45 minutes.
Iraq is a manufactured conflict for the sake of geopolitical dominance in the area.
So we are disappointed that some of our closest allies, including Canada, have not agreed with us on the urgent need for this military action against Iraq.
There is not a great sense that the Americans know what they are doing, or are making much progress in Iraq. And there is satisfaction in seeing that the Iraqis are successful in resisting the United States.
Initially, before the modern state of Iraq was created, there were three separate provinces here: a Shiite in the south, a largely Sunni one in the middle, and a Kurdish one in the north.
Americans were told repeatedly by President Bush and Vice President Cheney that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. None were ever found.
We are all happy when U.S. soldiers are killed week in and week out. The killing of U.S. soldiers in Iraq is legitimate and obligatory.
There were no international terrorists in Iraq until we went in. It was we who gave the perfect conditions in which Al Qaeda could thrive.
If the United States leads a multinational force into Iraq without United Nations backing, Canada should fight beside its neighbour. We’ve gone from being a middle power to a muddle power on this one.
The fact is that we wouldn’t be in Iraq if it weren’t for Democrats like Senator Kerry.
We estimate that once Iraq acquires fissile material – whether from a foreign source or by securing the materials to build an indigenous fissile material capability – it could fabricate a nuclear weapon within one year.
Barack Obama became president, and he abandoned Iraq. He left, and when he left Al Qaida was done for. ISIS was created because of the void that we left, and that void now exists as a caliphate the size of Indiana.
We need to stop spending money on death, the war in Iraq and on enhancing the lives of the people in our own country.
Our priority is to go after ISIL. And so what we have said is that we are not engaging in a military action against the Syrian regime. We are going after ISIL facilities and personnel who are using Syria as a safe haven, in service of our strategy in Iraq.
President Bush’s war on Iraq is viewed broadly in Islamic communities as an attack on Islam, and thus the President has alienated a large part of one fifth of the world’s population.
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.
We cannot cut and run. If we are to ensure freedom and democracy, it is essential that we follow through on our obligation to bring about stability in Iraq.
It matters not what your individual position is on either war we are currently prosecuting – in Iraq or Afghanistan – certainly we can all agree protesting at military funerals is a cruel and unnecessary hardship on our military families during their most difficult hour.
