"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."

"George W. Bush, United States president"

"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]."

"These guys all knew where those munitions were. They knew how to get to those weapons and how to use them. And you've just sent them away and said they don't exist? Common sense tells me you don't do that."

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

"Linda Bilmes, former Assistant Secretary of the U.S. Department of Commerce, professor at Harvard Kennedy School at Harvard University and co-author of The Three Trillion Dollar War"

"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."

"Seth Moulton, lieutenant, U.S. Marines, elected the U.S. representative for Massachusetts's 6th congressional district in 2014"

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

"We severely condemn criminal action of U.S. forces. We mourn the catastrophe by the hands of evil forces. We demand the execution of Wahabi unbelievers who have the support of the Americans. They have been arrested and admitted their guilt before all who saw them. We demand their execution."

"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."

"The north and the west parts are controlled by the insurgents."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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]"

"Iraq has drones. And they're going to take these drones, and they're going to put them on these ships, and they're going to arm the drones with chemical and biological weapons, and they're going to fly these drones off the ships and attack the East Coast of the United States. You know, this is absolute fantasyland. These people were, I don't know what they were smoking, but it must have been very good."

"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."

"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."

"[Archival footage] General Garner and I are pledged to working very closely together."

"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."

"We continue to watch Iraq's involvement in terrorist activities."

"I'm listening. I'm listening to political leaders. [De Mello later perishes in the Canal Hotel bombing on August 19, 2003]"

"Joost Hiltermann, Mideast director at the International Crisis Group"

"Sérgio Vieira de Mello, Brazilian United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, who perished in the August 19, 2003 Canal Hotel bombing in Baghdad."

"The Iran-Iraq war ends in stalemate in 1988. In 1990, Saddam invades Kuwait. A US lead coalition expelled him... in a war masterminded by Dick Cheney, then Secretary of Defense... Paul Wolfowitz, then [[w:Under Secretary of Defense for Policy|"

"Michael Palin - Vyacheslav Molotov, Minister of Foreign Affairs"

"Dermot Crowley - Lazar Kaganovich, Minister of Trade"

"Rupert Friend - Vasily Stalin, Major General in the Soviet Air Force"

"Andrea Riseborough - Svetlana Stalina"

"Jason Isaacs - Georgy Zhukov, Marshal of the Soviet Union"

"Paddy Considine - Andreyev (Conductor)"

"Paul Chahidi - Nikolai Bulganin, Minister of Defense"

"Olga Kurylenko - Maria Veniaminovna Yudina (Pianist)"

"A modern soldier's greatest fear? It's not death, it's not starvation, it's chafing!"

"Andreyev: Don't worry, nobody's gonna get killed, I promise you. This is just a musical emergency!"

"Simon Russell Beale - Lavrentiy Beria, Minister of the Interior"

"Adrian McLoughlin - Joseph Stalin, General Secretary of the Soviet Communist Party"

"Steve Buscemi - Nikita Khrushchev, Head of the Moscow Communist Party"

"Time for a cowboy movie. Who's in my posse?"

"What took you so long, you fucking walk here?"

"My father's going to die. I'm going to have you to look after me. I mean, I may as well just shoot myself like Mother."

"[to his dog] Uncle Nicky's going to be dead if he doesn't get a move on, isn't he? Yes, he is!"

"[to Beria's burning corpse] I will bury you in history! You hear me, you fat fucker? You smell like rendered horse, you burning asshole..."

"Could you do me a favor and nod as I'm speaking to you? People are looking to me for reassurance and I have no idea what's going on."

"I've always been loyal to Stalin, always. These arrests were authorized by Stalin...but Stalin was also loyal to the collective leadership, and that is true loyalty...however, he also had an iron will, undeviating, strong. Could we not do the same, and stick to what we believed in?...No. It is stronger still to forge our own beliefs within the beliefs of the collective leadership...which I have now...done."

"I hate being sober. It's a terrible, terrible mood to be in."