"We were starting from zero. I mean, if there are no desks, no chairs and no typewriters left... Where do we go and meet the Iraqis to start working? There was no structure left. Physical structure or bureaucratic structure. We had no phone list, we had no phones for a while, so I guess having no phone list was not really that important. We had no information, we had no place to go... we did not know who to contact. Not the best way to... Not the best way to start an occupation."

"We had done... a list of twenty sites that we thought needed to be protected. Um, historical, cultural, artistic, religious. And we provided that, and it really made no difference, whatsoever. [Titlecard: The oil ministry was the only building protected by the U.S. ministry. None of the sites on ORHA's list was protected]"

"Paul Pillar, National Intelligence Officer for the Mideast on the National Intelligence Council from 2000-5"

"Ali Fadhil, an Iraqi journalist"

"When we were first starting the reconstruction, there were 500 ways to do it wrong and two or three ways to do it right. What we didn't understand is that we were going to go through all 500."

"We're talking people coming in with industrial cranes and walking off with parts of a power plant."

"Just imagine the room/the suite we're that we're sitting in, and all that you have is just concreted walls, everything is gone."

"Within the group itself, we probably had... five... who spoke any amount of Arabic."

"Richard Armitage, United States Deputy Secretary of State from 2001-5"

"When I say goodbye to my husband, I think I'm not coming back."

"I can't hold my peace any longer."

"If Iraq disintegrates and becomes an arena of civil war, much of it will become like little Afghanistan, it's where terrorists from all over the world will find refuge."

"Robert Hutchings, former chairman of the National Intelligence Council"

"James Fallows, author of Blind into Baghdad, national editor at The Atlantic"

"Hugo Gonzales, field artillery gunner, U.S. Army"

"Are you telling me that's the best America can do?... No, don't tell me that... That makes me angry. Don't tell the Marines who fought for a month in Najaf that. Don't tell the Marines who are still fighting every day in Fallujah that that's the best America can do. That Moqtada al-Sadr, a terrorist leader is now a rising political figure. That makes me angry."

"I joined the army to ah... support my country...and ah... thought it was a good thang to do, ya know..."

"Hard to imagine." Anyone who had any experience in the interventions of the '90s knew that the opposite was true. You need X numbers of soldiers per 1,000 citizens, simply to provide a modicum of security. But Paul Wolfowitz couldn't imagine it."

"At best, I think, they were liars. And at worst, they were provocateurs. If it's an NCI source, it was always looked at very, very skeptically by the analysts. But that wasn't the case with the policymakers."

"I'm standing there watching these insurgents pull out rockets and mortars and bombs from these weapons caches that the Iraqis had stashed everywhere. And you go to the British or to the U.S., whoever's there, with your little GPS receiver and say; "Hey, guys. We found like 18,000 million tons of bombs", and there are a bunch of Iraqis there with AK-47s taking it away. Probably not the best idea. Here's where it's located. And they say to you, we just don't have enough people to cover it. And it just - I couldn't believe it. It wasn't the right answer. Go there and take care of it, for your security, for the civilians' security - for everybody. It's just a bad idea."

"It was... an honor... to go there and help my fellow soldiers... to do... what they telled us to go and do there maybe... take out a... dictator... out of the... power... to reestablish the democracy. To be in the bucket, if anything happens, you gonna get it."

"This war was conceived by a very small group of people inside the Bush administration. They had an entirely naive vision of what Iraq was and what Iraqis would do once the regime fell."

"14... out of Iraq's 18 govenors (provinces)... were under rebel control... when general Schwartzkopf... allowed... Saddam Hussein to use... helicopter gunships... to massacre... the rebels... men, women and children."

"When you see the same architects of those policies... on the one hand, talking about getting right what they had gotten wrong, back in 1991, you know... finishing the job. I was tempting to say, well... maybe they've learned."

"Baghdad gets 10 bombings, 10 to 15 bombings a day and it's maybe 50 KIA. But I suspect that's drastically under-reported. We're probably only capturing a third of what's actually happening."

"[Archival footage] His regime aids and protects terrorists, including members of Ạl Qạedạ."

"Chalabi asserted that post-war Iraq would be pro-American and easily stabilized, particularly if Chalabi himself was in charge."

"Larry DiRita addressed us in one forum and said, by the end of August of 2003, we will have all but 25,000 to 30,000 troops out of Iraq. I heard him say that in a room full of people. And I turned to my colleagues and I said, "This guy doesn't know what he's talking about. It's physically impossible.""

"Even more remarkable that the decision that the decision to disband the army is how that this decision was made... secretly... over a single week, by a few men in Washington, D.C. who had never been to Iraq. They did not consult with the military commanders in Iraq, not with the joint Chiefs of staff, ORHA, the State Department, the CIA, the National Security Council, or even, apparently the president of the United States. Walter Slocombe and Paul Hughes were reinterviewed in order to reconstruct the events leading to the dissolution of the army."

"In the months leading up to the invasion, a debate over troop levels required in Iraq had been privately brewing between the military leadership and Donald Rumsfeld. Rumsfeld and his deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, believed that a force of under 100,000 troops would be sufficient for the invasion and occupation of Iraq. A month before the invasion, the fight over troop levels became public, as the chief of staff of the Army, Eric Shinseki, testified before the Senate Armed Services Committee, ignoring pressure from Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz."

"The Iraq National Museum in Baghdad, number one on ORHA's list, contained some of the world's most important artifacts of early human civilization. The museum was never protected."

"A number of the most generals came to the Channal Hotel, the UN headquarters and they were very explicit of the consequences of letting this order stand and of marginalizing this incredibly powerful segment of society would be an insurgency. A Lebanese diplomat named Hassan Salami turned to his colleagues as the generals walked away after one of their meetings and said; "I see bullets in their eyes" [Repeats Salami quote for dramatic emphasis]."

"I just... was waiting for the war to happen because it was the... the only ray of hope I had to look for... And when it happened, I was... excited, that things would move slowly... but... towards better circumstances."

"I've seen people welcoming the Coalition troops, because we thought everything was planned, everything was prepared."

"From here we can't change anything, because it's out of control now. I don't have future plans for being in Iraq. I don't see the bit of light at the end of the tunnel yet."

"There is a belief that the Americans actually encourage the looting or wanted to happen, the destruction of our country. How could they let this happen? Whether you're Sunni or Shia, you're outrage about the looting."

"I mean, you had huge ammunition dumps that weren't guarded until several weeks, if not a couple of months, after major combat actions ended."

"I joined the Marine because I always thought it as a really important job... and didn't feel I'll be content with myself going through life knowing that other people had fought for my freedom."

"This is not just people stealing from grocery stores. I mean, this was people chipping concrete, walls into little pieces so they can take the rebar out."

"We could certainly have stopped the looting if that was our assigned task."

"Yet when Iraq's southern Shiite's rise up the administration allows Saddam to repress them"

"It was such a confusing, loud, noisy, scary, hopeless place, and it was all put together. I'd see kids with ski caps on that said FBI on it and others would be giving me the big thumbs up. And you'd have other young men who probably fedayeen in civilian clothes giving me very hard stares... and... and... you know, always trying to size me up and always covering up the license plate of the car."

"This is what it is. This is how we live it. This is how we see it. This is how we smell it and feel it. It's not a situation that you can say, "Let's try this. It will help. Let's try this, it will help." No, it's not."

"We have so many kinds of militias, you have the Mahdi militia, you have the Badr militia, you have many militias in this country, and they are all very democratic in arresting people and killing them."

"If Iraq goes back to some sort of Islamo-fascist regime like we had in under the Taliban in Afghanistan, then we are back to September the 10th, 2001, except, a much larger scale, and you know, with billions of dollars of oil money in their disposal"

"The State Department's "Future of Iraq" project - a 13-volume study on post-war Iraq - was ignored by The Pentagon."