Iraq War

"Iraq marks the beginning of a new cycle. It offers us an opportunity to watch the Corporate-Military cabal that has come to be known as 'Empire' at work...As the battle to control the world's resources intensifies, economic colonialism through formal military aggression is staging a comeback. Iraq is the logical culmination of the process of corporate globalization in which neo-colonialism and neo-liberalism have fused."

"If we can find it in ourselves to peep behind the curtain of blood, we would glimpse the pitiless transactions taking place backstage. But first, briefly, the stage itself. In 1991 US President George Bush senior mounted Operation Desert Storm... Half a million Iraqi children died because of the regime of economic sanctions in the run up to Operation Shock and Awe. Until recently, while there was a careful record of how many US soldiers had lost their lives, we had no idea of how many Iraqis had been killed. US General Tommy Franks said "We don't do body counts" (meaning Iraqi body counts). He could have added "We don't do the Geneva Convention either.""

"A new, detailed study, fast-tracked by the Lancet medical journal and extensively peer reviewed, estimates that 100,000 Iraqis have lost their lives since the 2003 invasion. That's one hundred halls full of people - like this one. That's one hundred halls full of friends, parents, siblings, colleagues, lovers...like you. The difference is that there aren't many children here today let's not forget Iraq's children. Technically that bloodbath is called precision bombing. In ordinary language, it's called butchering,"

"So the 'civilized' 'modern' world - built painstakingly on a legacy of genocide, slavery and colonialism - now controls most of the world's oil. And most of the world's weapons, most of the world's money, and most of the world's media. The embedded, corporate media in which the doctrine of Free Speech has been substituted by the doctrine of Free If You Agree Speech."

"The UN's Chief Weapons Inspector Hans Blix said he found no evidence of nuclear weapons in Iraq. Every scrap of evidence produced by the US and British governments was found to be false - whether it was reports of Saddam Hussein buying uranium from Niger , or the report produced by British Intelligence which was discovered to have been plagiarized from an old student dissertation. And yet, in the prelude to the war, day after day the most 'respectable' newspapers and TV channels in the US, headlined the 'evidence' of Iraq's arsenal of weapons of nuclear weapons."

"What does peace mean to the poor who are being actively robbed of their resources and for whom everyday life is a grim battle for water, shelter, survival and, above all, some semblance of dignity? For them, peace is war."

"We know very well who benefits from war in the age of Empire. But we must also ask ourselves honestly who benefits from peace in the age of Empire? War mongering is criminal. But talking of peace without talking of justice could easily become advocacy for a kind of capitulation. And talking of justice without unmasking the institutions and the systems that perpetrate injustice, is beyond hypocritical."

"It's easy to blame the poor for being poor. It's easy to believe that the world is being caught up in an escalating spiral of terrorism and war. That's what allows the American President to say "You're either with us or with the terrorists." But we know that that's a spurious choice. We know that terrorism is only the privatization of war. That terrorists are the free marketers of war. They believe that the legitimate use of violence is not the sole prerogative of the State."

"It is mendacious to make moral distinction between the unspeakable brutality of terrorism and the indiscriminate carnage of war and occupation. Both kinds of violence are unacceptable. We cannot support one and condemn the other."

"Saddam is gone. It's a good thing, but I don't agree with what was done. It was a big mistake. The American government made several errors, one of which is how easy it would be to get rid of Saddam and how hard it would be to unite the country."

"David Winters of the University of Michigan found in 2005 that the high RWAs in a large sample of university students believed the invasion of Iraq constituted a just war. They thought the danger posed by Iraq was so great, the United States had no other choice. They thought the invasion occurred only as a last resort, after all peaceful alternatives had been exhausted, and that the war would bring about more good than evil. They thought the "pre-emptive" attack for self-defense had been justified even though no weapons of mass destruction were discovered. They also rejected the suggestion that the war was conducted to control oil supplies and extend American power, or as an act of revenge. And they still believed that Saddam had been involved in the 9/11 attacks."

"[T]here is no longer a preponderance of military force that allows the West to impose its will, the U.S. defeat in Iraq being the most extraordinary illustration of that fact."

"I like to tell people when the final history is written on Iraq, it will look like just a comma because there is — my point is, there's a strong will for democracy."

"British and US forces fired about 320 tonnes of depleted uranium munitions in the 1991 Gulf war and may have used up to 2000 tonnes in the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Because of its extreme density it is used to make the tips of armour piercing shells. Reports from southern Iraq have documented a steep rise in the incidence of cancers since the 1990s, especially cases in children."

"I asked about victory and how it might be achieved, and he said that would require more than security in Iraq. There would have to be self-government and the physical reconstruction of the country- all the "lines of operation" in Casey's war plan. "Is this going to happen in your lifetime?" I asked. "Yes, it is. Well, I hope, yeah. I don't know," he said. "I should retract that line. It can happen in my lifetime." "Do you have any doubts this was the right decision to invade Iraq?" "I have no doubts at all," he said. "None. Zero." "Isn't the process, though, you always have to doubt?" I said. "I live on doubt." "I'm sorry for you," the Marine general said. "Don't be sorry for me," I said. "It's a wonderful process." "I do not have doubt about what we've done," he said. "We did not do this. When we were sitting home minding our own business, we got attacked on 9/11.""

"There it was: "We did not do this." There is a deep feeling among some senior Bush administration officials that somehow we had not started the Iraq War. We had been attacked. Bin Laden, al Qaeda, the other terrorist and anti-American forces- whether groups or countries or philosophies- could be lumped together. It was one war, the long war, the two-generation war that Wolfowitz's Bletchley Group II had described after 9/11. "You sure it's the right war at the right time?" I asked Chairman Pace. "Yes, absolutely," Pace said. "Fundamentally, yes. I said that before we started. And I'll say that today. It may not surprise you to understand that taking my country's battles to my country's enemies on their playing field is where I think we should be. To protect my country, to do my oath to my country, and to protect my kids and my grandkids and your kids and your grandkids, I have zero doubt that we have done the right thing.""

"The president's national security adviser understandably wanted to win the 2006 congressional elections. Having the president answer questions about Iraq was inconsistent with that goal. The strategy was denial. With all Bush's upbeat talk and optimism, he had not told the American public the truth about what Iraq had become."

"However it ends, the war in Iraq will have a profound influence on the future of the Middle East, global stability, and the security of the United States, which will remain, for the foreseeable future, directly affected by events in that dangerous part of the world. The war is part of a broader struggle in the Arab and Muslim world, the struggle between violent extremists and the force of modernity and moderation."

"Who will demand accountability for the failure of our national political leadership involved in the management of this war? They have unquestionably been derelict in the performance of their duty. In my profession, these types of leaders would immediately be relieved or court martialed."

"As I have heard Bush say, only a wartime president is likely to achieve greatness, in part because the epochal upheavals of war provide the opportunity for transformative change of the kind Bush hoped to achieve. In Iraq, Bush saw his opportunity to create a legacy of greatness."

"In this case, the 'liberal media' didn't live up to its reputation. If it had, the country would have been better served."

"As a Texas loyalist who followed Bush to Washington with great hope and personal affection and as a proud member of his administration, I was all too ready to give him and his highly experienced foreign policy advisers the benefit of the doubt on Iraq. Unfortunately, subsequent events have showed that our willingness to trust the judgment of Bush and his team was misplaced."

"The important thing to remember about the Iraq war is that the whole world protested against it. For the first time in history, the whole world, not just me and my husband Bob, but the whole world came together to try to stop a war before it started. That had never happened before. I have a book with pictures of those protests from all over the world, from Africa, from Asia, from all over Europe. In every country people said, “No, no, don’t do it, don’t do it.” Whatever happens now, this fact is in the world. I think with those protests, we made maybe a couple of inches of progress."

"Osama Bin Laden and George Bush were both terrorists. They were both building international networks that perpetrate terror and devastate people’s lives. Bush with the Pentagon, the WTO, the IMF and the World Bank. Bin Laden with Al-Qaeda. The difference is that nobody elected Bin Laden... The United States supported Saddam Hussein and made sure that he ruled with an iron fist for all those years. Then they used the sanctions to break the back of civil society. Then they made Iraq disarm. Then they attacked Iraq. And now they’ve taken over all its assets."

"[Habbush] tells us there are no WMDs. He tells us Saddam's mindset, that he's afraid of the Iranians more than us, afraid of being showed to be a toothless tiger. That is something we ignore."

"Stewart: And the letter says literally in it Mohammad Atta did train in Iraq, and the uranium thing. Did anyone think it was weird that the letter combined the two things that were in question, that in the letter it said, Oh, and he did buy uranium from Niger...? Suskind: … It was an overreach moment. The letter popped up. Tom Brokaw did it on Meet the Press. William Safire writes about it. A couple days in, about a week in, people are just like, Geez, it's an awful lot in one letter. And that overreach kind of revealed it to be fraudulent. Stewart: Why didn't anyone pursue it at that time, the fraudulent nature of it? Why did that just fall away? Suskind: It was hard to get at. It's a closely held thing, and this is an operation through the CIA. You need someone who's going to stand up in daylight and say, Hey, this is what happened. Stewart: Your source in the CIA, Richard? Suskind: He's one of the folks. Stewart: He now says, I never said that; I was just kidding around. What's the situation with that? Suskind: He's a good guy. All the [sources] involved here are good guys, walking around with a kind of lump in their chest for awhile. I'm sympathetic to all the sources. They're under a lot of pressure. In this particular part of the book, there are a lot of disclosures, but this one, the White House is obviously intensely interested in, since there may be illegality that has constitutional consequences. Stewart: That is maybe the nicest way of saying "impeachment" I think I've ever heard in my life."

"It just seem like she (Pelosi) was gonna really look to impeach Bush and get him out of office, which personally I think it would have been a wonderful thing. Absolutely, for the war...He lied! he got us into the war with lies, and... I mean look at the trouble Bill Clinton got into with something that was totally unimportant! and they tried to impeach him which was nonsense... and yet Bush got us into this 'horrible war' with lies, by lying, by saying they had weapon of mass destruction, by saying all sort of things, and turned out not to be true."

"While the fast, drastic reduction in violence that occurred in Iraq in late 2007 was a tremendous milestone and achievement, there is a tendency among the military and American politicians to triumphantly overstate the gains. The mere absence of rampant murder does not produce a stable, healthy society on its own, and Iraq was and is a long way from being a free, fair, prosperous, and democratic civil society. During my visit to the area, sectarian resentments were festering and tribal harmony remained a long way off. Though slowly sputtering back to life, the economy was still barely functioning. Public services remained woefully inadequate or nonexistent. Sewage flowed into the street and the hum of generators to supplement the pitiful electric generators was ever present. Courts, government offices, and schools were underfunded and understaffed, if they were open at all. With he multipartite cease-fire hardening into the norm, however, and violence at four-year lows across the nation, the United States began in late 2008 dismantling much of the surge it had begun less than two years before. With attacks down over 80 percent in Babil province (where much of the Triangle of Death is located), U.S. forces handed full responsibility for the territory back to the Iraqis in October 2008. By January 2009, there were only one-third the U>S. troops in the Triangle that had been there a year before."

"In June 2009, the United States further withdrew across Iraq, retrenching to large bases and largely staying out of day-to-day security operations except for in a few restive areas. For some months before, the United States ad likewise begun scaling back on the Sons of Iraq initiative, a move that ha not, as many predicted, resulted in a wholesale return among former insurgents to their murderous ways. There are still bombings in Iraq, sometimes very lethal ones, but they remain, for now, fairly isolated incidents. While Iraq may never become the model of Middle Eastern democracy and capitalism that the Bush administration envisioned, the current consensus among military chiefs as well as politicians and planners of every political affiliation is that the situation there is stable enough to allow the United States to withdraw completely without considering it a defeat. With the war in Afghanistan deteriorating rapidly and taking on a renewed urgency with the Obama administration, the United States remains on schedule to withdraw all American troops from Iraq by the end of 2011. For some, however, the war will never be over."

"Take the president’s mention of Mosul. It is a city in Iraq, and the Americans who died there and in other Iraqi cities died because of the criminality of President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney, who manufactured a criminal war of aggression against Iraq, a country that posed no threat to the US. They died too because of the cowardice and venality of the Democrats in Congress who allowed themselves to be bullied and extorted into supporting that criminal war. The five thousand Americans who died, and the hundreds of thousands more who have been gravely wounded in that war, not to mention the more than a million who fought there or worked in support roles for others who fought, were not defending any of our “cherished ideals.” They were simply helping oil companies like Exxon/Mobil, , Shell and yes, British Petroleum, secure control of the Iraqi oilfields. They were simply helping Bush and Cheney win re-election. They were simply helping inflate the profits of , , and Blackwater. Noble deaths indeed."

"I woke up in the middle of the night with the sound of heavy explosion. It was deep at night. I do not remember what time it was. I just remember the sound was so heavy and so very shocking. Everything in my room was shaking -- my heart, my windows, my bed, everything. I looked out the windows and I saw a full half-circle of explosion. I thought it was just like the movies, but the movies had not conveyed them in the powerful image that I was seeing full of bright red and orange and gray, and a full circle of explosion. And I kept on staring at it until it disappeared. I went back to my bed, and I prayed, and I secretly thanked God that that missile did not land on my family's home, that it did not kill my family that night. Thirty years have passed, and I still feel guilty about that prayer, for the next day, I learned that that missile landed on my brother's friend's home and killed him and his father, but did not kill his mother or his sister. His mother showed up the next week at my brother's classroom and begged seven-year-old kids to share with her any picture they may have of her son, for she had lost everything."

"I grew up in war-torn Iraq, and I believe that there are two sides of wars and we've only seen one side of it. We only talk about one side of it. But there's another side that I have witnessed as someone who lived in it and someone who ended up working in it."

"I grew up with the colors of war -- the red colors of fire and blood, the brown tones of earth as it explodes in our faces and the piercing silver of an exploded missile, so bright that nothing can protect your eyes from it. I grew up with the sounds of war -- the staccato sounds of gunfire, the wrenching booms of explosions, ominous drones of jets flying overhead and the wailing warning sounds of sirens. These are the sounds you would expect, but they are also the sounds of dissonant concerts of a flock of birds screeching in the night, the high-pitched honest cries of children and the thunderous, unbearable silence. "War," a friend of mine said, "is not about sound at all. It is actually about silence, the silence of humanity." [...] I have learned not only that the colors and the sounds of war are the same, but the fears of war are the same. You know, there is a fear of dying."

"In 2003, Carter’s doctrine of force when necessary was carried out with “shock and awe,” in what was the most intensive and profligate use of fossil fuel the world has ever witnessed. Recall, too, that as Baghdad fell, invading US troops ignored the looting of schools, hospitals and a nuclear power facility as well as the ransacking of national museums and burning of the National Library and Archives holding peerless, irreplaceable documentation of the “cradle of civilization.” The US military did, however, immediately seize and guard the Iraqi Oil Ministry Headquarters and positioned 2,000 soldier to safeguard oilfields. First things first."

"Many factors have converged and clarified over time to support the proposition that, at its core, the Iraq war was a war over oil. Eliminating weapons of mass destruction, deposing a tyrannical dictator, rooting out terrorism linked to 9/11, employing gunboat diplomacy to instill democracy and human rights – all were largely foils for oil. Alan Greenspan put it squarely: I am saddened that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everybody knows: the Iraq war is largely about oil. As we near peak oil production, that is, the point of diminishing returns for oil exploration and production and higher oil prices, OPEC countries’ share of global production “will rise from 46 percent in 2007 to 56 percent in 2030.” Iraq has the third-largest reserves of oil; Iraq and Kazakhstan are “two of the top four countries with the largest [petroleum] production increases forecast from 2000 to 2030. The Middle East and Central Asia are, predictably, epicenters of US military operations and wars. A 2006 report on national security and US oil dependency released by the Council on Foreign Relations concluded that the US should maintain “a strong military posture that permits suitably rapid deployment to the [Persian Gulf] region” for at least 20 years. US military professionals concur and are preparing for the prospect of “large-scale armed struggle” over access to energy resources."

"Our national security has been reduced in large part to energy security, which has led us to militarizing our access to oil through establishing a military presence across the oil-bearing regions of the world and instigating armed conflict in Iraq, sustaining it in Afghanistan and provoking it in Libya... Air war a model for future wars? If so, a death knell for the planet. This insatiable militarism is the single greatest institutional contributor to the growing natural disasters intensified by global climate change."

"These are not just geopolitical fights based on principle, but these fights are based on real material realities, real material advantages. So you look at the routes of these various pipelines that are being proposed and actually built to bring natural gas from Central Asia to the European markets. Turkey felt that it was in their interest to make sure that they can influence the best deal possible that will allow them to be positioned to take full advantage of these pipelines. That's one of the reasons many people argue that Syria had to go: that when there were proposals to run these natural gas pipelines from Iran through Iraq and through Syria, that it was a direct threat to some of the ambitions that Erdogan has for Turkey."

"March 19 marks 15 years since the U.S.-UK invasion of Iraq in 2003, and the American people have no idea of the enormity of the calamity the invasion unleashed. The U.S. military has refused to keep a tally of Iraqi deaths. General Tommy Franks, the man in charge of the initial invasion, bluntly told reporters, “We don’t do body counts.” One survey found that most Americans thought Iraqi deaths were in the tens of thousands. But our calculations, using the best information available, show a catastrophic estimate of 2.4 million Iraqi deaths since the 2003 invasion. The number of Iraqi casualties is not just a historical dispute, because the killing is still going on today. Since several major cities in Iraq and Syria fell to Islamic State in 2014, the U.S. has led the heaviest bombing campaign since the American War in Vietnam, dropping 105,000 bombs and missiles and reducing most of Mosul and other contested Iraqi and Syrian cities to rubble."

"I get asked all the time "Do I feel guilty about what happened?" the answer's "No, I don't" I've made the decision, the best decision I could make... It was important for the defense of our country, I knew going into war that somebody can get hurt that...but made whole decision so much graver...on the other hand, Laura and I have met hundreds who said "I would it again Mr. President""

"Barack Obama became the fourth consecutive U.S. president to order air strikes in Iraq.President George Bush went into Iraq in 1991 during the Gulf War under the auspices of a U.N. Security Council resolution against the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait and with a resolution authorizing the use of military force (AUMF) from Congress. In the late 1990s, President Bill Clinton ordered airstrikes in Iraq in 1998, claiming Saddam Hussein had been thwarting U.N. weapons inspectors, sans Congressional authorization, arguing the strikes were a temporary measure covered by the War Powers Act. In 2003, under the pretext of problems with the treatment of U.N. weapons inspectors and using multiple U.N. Security Council resolutions to justify the action, President George W. Bush ordered an invasion of Iraq. He, too, had an AUMF, pinned on U.N. Security Council resolutions worried about weapons of mass destruction (WMD). Last year President Obama reinserted the U.S. military into Iraq to combat ISIS."

"[I]t's very popular to criticize Bush today, Bush 43. Especially for the Iraq invasion, and I’ve heard many voices, even within the Republican Party, it’s just floating with the popular trend. First of all, I have to say as somebody who was born and raised in a Communist country, I cannot criticize any action that led to the destruction of dictatorship."

"As a preemptive action today, however well-justified, may come back with unwelcome consequences in the future.... I don't care how precise your bombs and your weapons are when you set them off, innocent people will die."

"Anyone who has ever studied the history of American diplomacy, especially military diplomacy, knows that you might start in a war with certain things on your mind as a purpose of what you are doing, but in the end, you found yourself fighting for entirely different things that you had never thought of before … In other words, war has a momentum of its own and it carries you away from all thoughtful intentions when you get into it. Today, if we went into Iraq, like the president would like us to do, you know where you begin. You never know where you are going to end."

"They destroyed bridges, they destroyed churches, mosques, colleges, buildings, plants. They destroyed places, houses, palaces. They killed people, and elderly, but they did not push Iraq back into the pre-industrial age."

"In the giddy spirit of the day, nothing could quite top the wish list bellowed out by one man in the throng of people greeting American troops from the 101st Airborne Division who marched into town today. What, the man was asked, did he hope to see now that the Baath Party had been driven from power in his town? What would the Americans bring? "Democracy," the man said, his voice rising to lift each word to greater prominence. "Whiskey. And sexy!""

"We keep fighting this war in Iraq, a war that should've never been authorized and should've never been waged, a war that costing us 20 cents - $275 million a day, that could have been invested in rebuilding communities all across this country, then it's time to take that bullet out!"

"The White House had concocted a fake letter from Habbush to Saddam, backdated to July 1, 2001. It said that 9/11 ring leader Mohammed Atta had actually trained for his mission in Iraq—thus showing finally that there was an operational link between Saddam and al Qaeda, something the Vice Presidents Office had been pressing CIA to prove since 9/11 as a justification to invade Iraq. There is no link."

"The British and American governments are about to destroy all hopes for peace anywhere in our world for ever. This war has already begun."

"They're not going to like this downtown."

"Jalil Habbush, Habbush claimed Iraq had no WMD; Ron Suskind, The Way of the World"