All Quotes

"The country faces big challenges and we can address these challenges together with parties from different backgrounds and ideologies who share the concerns and interest as the people of Iraq."

"Our interest must not risk Iraq's interests. If we can build an Iraq on the basis of our own independence and sovereignty, I think this Iraq will be respected by others, whether it be the Americans, Iranians or any other country."

"Iraqis will decide who controls Iraq - no one from outside."

"Iraq will have a formally independent government that will be in perpetual gridlock and chaos."

"Few talk or think about Iraq these days; the media ignores this important but demolished nation. Iraq, let us recall, was the target of a major western aggression concocted by George W Bush, Dick Cheney and Britain’s Tony Blair, and financed and encouraged by the Gulf oil sheikdoms and Saudi Arabia... Most people don’t understand that Iraq remains a US-occupied nation. We hear nothing about the billions of dollars of Iraqi oil being extracted by big US oil firms since 2003. For the United States, Iraq was a treasure house of oil with 12 per cent of the world reserves. It was OPEC’s second largest producer."

"The inability of the United States to comprehend what it was becoming involved in when... it declared a Global War on Terror, has to be reckoned one of the singular failures of national security policy over the past twenty years. Not only did the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq make bad situations worse, but the fact that no one is Washington was able to define “victory” and think in terms of an exit strategy has meant that the wars and instability are still with us....The Iraqi Parliament has, in fact, asked U.S. forces to leave the country, a request that has been ignored both by Donald Trump and Joe Biden. Trump actually threatened to freeze Iraqi bank assets to pressure the Iraqis into accepting the continued U.S. occupation. At the same time, American troops illegally present in neighboring Syria, continue to occupy that country’s oil fields to deprive the government in Damascus of much needed resources. Neither Iraq nor Syria threatens the United States in any way."

"The future of Iraq after Saddam Hussein is also an open question. Some of my colleagues and some American analysts now speak authoritatively of Sunnis, Shiites, and Kurds in Iraq, and how Iraq can be a test case for democracy in the Arab world. How many of us really know and understand much about Iraq, the country, the history, the people, the role in the Arab world? I approach the issue of post-Saddam Iraq and the future of democracy and stability in the Middle East with more caution, realism, and a bit more humility. While the people of the Arab world need no education from America about Saddam's record of deceit, aggression, and brutality, and while many of them may respect and desire the freedoms the American model offers, imposing democracy through force in Iraq is a roll of the dice. A democratic effort cannot be maintained without building durable Iraqi political institutions and developing a regional and international commitment to Iraq's reconstruction. No small task."

"Actually, who is the terrorist, who is against human rights? The answer is the United States because they attacked Iraq. Moreover, it is the terrorist king, waging war."

"We hope that war will not take place, but if war is forced upon us then Iraq will continue to be here and this country with history of over 8000 years, this country, the cradle of the first civilization of humanity will not finish just like that even though a huge power may want to be like that. Nobody! Nobody should accept that Iraq should finish in such a way!"

"Iraq is a great nation now, as it has been at times throughout history. Nations generally "go to the top" only once. Iraq, however, has been there many times, before and after Islam. Iraq is the only nation like this in the world. This "gift" was given to the Iraqi people by God. When Iraqi people fall, they rise again."

"Iraq’s democratic and more importantly constitutional structures that were put in place as a result of 2003 and U.S. direct involvement have weathered 12 years, ISIS seizing one-third of the country, a simultaneous drop by 50% of its main economic driver oil, and conflict with Kurdistan."

"The tension between these conflicting aims is perhaps particularly acute in the late twentieth century because of the publicity given to the existence of various alternative “models” for emulation. On the one hand, there are the extremely successful “trading states”—chiefly in Asia, like Japan and Hong Kong, but also including Switzerland, Sweden, and Austria—which have taken advantage of the great growth in world production and in commercial interdependence since 1945, and whose external policy emphasizes peaceful, trading relations with other societies. In consequence, they have all sought to keep defense spending as low as is compatible with the preservation of national sovereignty, thereby freeing resources for high domestic consumption and capital investment. On the other hand, there are the various “militarized” economies—Vietnam in Southeast Asia, Iran and Iraq as they engage in their lengthy war, Israel and its jealous neighbors in the Near East, and the USSR itself—all of which allocate more (in some cases, much more) than 10 percent of their GNP to defense expenditures each year and, while firmly believing that such levels of spending are necessary to guarantee military security, manifestly suffer from that diversion of resources from productive, peaceful ends. Between the two poles of the merchant and the warrior states, so to speak, there lie most of the rest of the nations of this planet, not convinced that the world is a safe enough place to allow them to reduce arms expenditure to Japan’s unusually low level, but also generally uneasy at the high economic and social costs of large-scale spending upon armaments, and aware that there is a certain trade-off between short-term military security and long-term economic security."

"We have traded a dictator for a chaos that has left America less secure."

"If you mean by "military victory" an Iraqi government that can be established and whose writ runs across the whole country, that gets the civil war under control and sectarian violence under control in a time period that the political processes of the democracies will support, I don't believe that is possible."

"The motivation for war is simple. The U.S. government started the war with Iraq in order to make it easy for U.S. corporations to do business in other countries. They intend to use cheap labor in those countries, which will make Americans rich."

"We should continue to support the Iraqi people's efforts to rebuild their country"

"As we act, let us not become the evil we deplore."

"We pray to God almighty to give us strength so we can meet the ambitious goals of our people, who have suffered a lot."

"Do not imagine that this problem is solely an Iraqi problem because the terrorist front represents a threat to all free countries and free people of the world. [...] Thousands of lives were tragically lost on Sept. 11 when these impostors of Islam reared their ugly head. Thousands more continue to die in Iraq today at the hands of the same terrorists who show complete disregard for human life."

"Al-Qaeda is still the biggest threat for Iraq and the region."

"Despite what we are suffering through, we haven't heard from our political partners with any support. They are not partners in facing the crisis, but they are partners in spending the wealth of Iraq."

"The administration has said that Iraq has no right to stockpile chemical or biological weapons, mainly because they have used them in the past. Well, if that's the standard by which these matters are decided, then the U.S. is the nation that set the precedent. The U.S. has stockpiled these same weapons and more for over forty years."

"Saddam set about transforming Iraq into what one dissident labelled the ‘Republic of Fear’. His notorious secret police, the Mukhabarat, together with the state internal security department (the Amn), established a fierce grip over the entire country. Regular massacres were carried out of Jews, Freemasons, communists, economic saboteurs or merely people who crossed Saddam or his greedy, pitiless family, all of whom served in his government. Purge followed upon purge, attended by show trials and televised confessions. Over the subsequent two decades Saddam Hussein killed at least 400,000 Iraqis — many of whom endured all manner of torture. His psychopathic sons, particularly the sadistic, demented heir apparent Uday, conducted their own struggles for power and brutal reigns of terror, personally torturing their enemies. At one point, Saddam's two sons-in-law, fearing murder by Uday, fled to Jordan but were tricked into returning and then slaughtered by Uday."

"Iran was in war with Iraq for 8 years, and Ayatollah Khomeini tried to topple Saddam, but he failed. Then, a few years later, in 2003, the U.S. entered Iraq and got rid of Saddam, but it got tangled in a never-ending conflict that turned Iraq into rubble and killed thousands of innocent Iraqis. Who is the winner of this terrible war? In my humble opinion, it is the Iranian regime, because with Saddam gone, they have tried to encourage an Islamic Republic in Iraq, which is the only other country with a majority Shia population in the region, and if this becomes reality, it could turn Iran into a huge power in the region. Actually, the U.S. invasion of Iraq greatly damaged the opposition in Iran, as now anyone who criticizes the Iranian regime is accused of asking for a U.S. invasion of Iran and working for the CIA. So one of the undisputable side effects of this war has been the strengthening of the government of Iran."

""It's the cradle of civilization," says McGuire Gibson, who teaches Mesopotamian archaeology at the University of Chicago. "It's the place where we get the first cities, the first writing, the first thoughts about what's man's relationship to God. It's the first sort of ideas about death. It's the first recorded literature that we have." Gibson and other archaeologists are quick to say their first concern if war comes to Iraq is the loss of human life. But with nearly 100,000 archaeological sites at stake, they're also concerned about the loss of human history, DeRose reports. Gibson says the 1991 Gulf War literally chipped away at a priceless past. One example is the massive 4,000-year-old Ziggurat at Ur, in southern Iraq. The temple pyramid was hit by at least 400 shells that took out "big chunks" from the structure, Gibson says."

"There's something that I don't understand. I don't understand how we ended up invading a country that had nothing to do with 911 while Osama bin Laden and Al-Qaeda are setting up basecamps in safe haven to train terrorists to attack us? That was Senator McCain judgement, it's wrong judgement, when Senator McCain was cheerleading the president to going into Iraq, he suggested 'it is going to be quick and easy, we'll be great liberator' and that's the wrong judgement and it's been costly to us."

"Rarely do we hear that Iraq has never committed any aggression against the United States. No one in the media questions our aggression against Iraq for the past 12 years by continuous bombing and imposed sanctions responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of children. [...] Only tyrants can take a nation to war without the consent of the people. The planned war against Iraq without a Declaration of War is illegal. It is unwise because of many unforeseen consequences that are likely to result. It is immoral and unjust, because it has nothing to do with US security and because Iraq has not initiated aggression against us. We must understand that the American people become less secure when we risk a major conflict driven by commercial interests and not constitutionally authorized by Congress. Victory under these circumstances is always elusive, and unintended consequences are inevitable."

"War and its repercussions for archaeology in Western Asia have been practically omnipresent for the last 25 years; Iraq's invasion of Kuwait in 1990 and the pilfering of objects in the Kuwait Museum, followed by the damage to and looting of Iraqi sites in the wake of the US-led ground invasion and post invasion the dynamiting of the Buddhas in Bamiyan, Afghanistan, by the Taliban in spring 2001 and the smashing of anthropomorphic imagery in the Kabul Museum; the damage during the US-led invasion and occupation of Iraq in 2003, most infamously in the Iraq Museum but also the ensuing looting of sites; the highly mediatized destructions of monuments and sites in Syria and northern Iraq by Islamic State since 2014 as well as the longer involvement of warring parties in looting and sales of antiquities; the damage to the Old City of Sanaa in Yemen as a result of Saudi bombing; and the ongoing conflicts in the West Bank and Gaza that have resulted in the neglect of sites."

"I talked about my desire to promote institutional change in parts of the world, like Iraq where there's a free press and free religion, and I told him that a lot of people in our country would hope that Russia would do the same."

"Without racism, soldiers would realize that they have more in common with the Iraqi people than they do with the billionaires who send us to war."

"George Herbert Walker Bush invented regime change in Iraq and Bill Clinton inherited it, and ran with it. The CIA made four concerted efforts to assassinate Saddam Hussein under Clinton's leadership. So it's not like this was a passive program; it was an active program... And I really am tired of all the Clinton Democrats running around getting all-sanctimonious over Iraq. It was them who killed 1.5 to 2.2 million Iraqis through sanctions. Sanctions that Madeline Albright, their illustrious Secretary of State, when confronted with the fact of 500,000 dead Iraqi children, said it was a price she was willing to pay."

"When you've seen all of Ionesco's plays, I felt at the end, you've seen one of them."

"A villain who shares one's guilt is inevitably more attractive than a hero convinced of one's innocence."

"We shall be judged by what we do, not by how we felt while we were doing it."

"If this was all about Israel dictating policy, we'd have skipped Iraq and gone straight to Iran. But this is not, and it never has been about Israel, or Iran, or Iraq. It's about America imposing its will on areas of the would that we believe to be in our national security interests. The big picture in the Middle East isn't Iran or Iraq. The big picture in the Middle East is China. People don't understand that. They don't know what’s going on right now. It's about leveraging control over Middle-Eastern and central-Asian oil, in order to dictate the pace of China's economic growth over the next 30 years."

"I wouldn't presume to present a plan different from that of the President. But I believe he was right to take on the war on terror on an aggressive front rather than a defensive front. We toppled the government ... walking away would mean a humanitarian disaster. We're there and we have a responsibility to finish the job."

"Oh, I don't know. You know, I thought about that last night, and just musing over the words, the phrase, and what constitutes it. If you think of our Civil War, this is really very different. If you think of civil wars in other countries, this is really quite different. There is -- there is a good deal of violence in Baghdad and two or three other provinces, and yet in 14 other provinces there's very little violence or numbers of incidents. So it's a -- it's a highly concentrated thing. It clearly is being stimulated by people who would like to have what could be characterized as a civil war and win it, but I'm not going to be the one to decide if, when or at all."

"Is the Iraqi state succeeding? I think there are some prospects for this country to be moving in the right direction. But the legacies of the past, the problems are really, really monumental... We need to deliver. Otherwise we will not be able to justify what we do in the eyes of our public. And public opinion does matter in Iraq. People speak their minds. People are engaged, are interested... Life is coming back... Every time I go out of the presidential palace in Baghdad — and I do try to go out as often as I can — I do see normalcy coming back, more and more. I do think there is a window of opportunity — it should be cherished. We’ve not had it like this for a long, long time... It’s precious, but precarious."

"The invasion of Iraq has resulted in the almost complete annihilation of that country’s Christian community, and the attempt to remove Bashar Assad from power in Syria has seen that country’s Christians mercilessly attacked by the agents of US power, radical Islamists. To be a Christian in the Middle East is to be in constant fear that the USA will set its sights on your country because wherever it arrives, Mujahideen are never that far away."

"Iraq’s prospects are looking brighter. A resurgent central government has defeated Islamic State, thanks in part to renewed American military involvement, and has taken back lands lost to the country’s Kurdistan autonomous region since 2003. And Iraq’s improbable political experiment has endured. In an increasingly repressive and authoritarian part of the world, this nation of 40 million people stands apart as a rare—though still deeply flawed—democracy. Iraq’s elected leaders insist that, despite their country’s many travails, it still has something to teach the rest of the Middle East."

"It's the Harvard of Terrorists."

"WHAT is Iraq, anyhow? Well, it's a lot of things, old and new. It is one of the oldest countries in the world–and one of the youngest under its present government."

"Baghdah’s control of Iraq’s provinces is, in part, based on its custodianship of the country’s petrodollars, with the oil sector contributing up to 99 percent of government revenue. The war against ISIS, however, forced the government to divert huge sums of money to the army, as well as to the salaries of 110,000 fighters from the Popular Mobilization Forces in November, in a bid to rein in Shia paramilitary groups. This siphoned much-needed revenue from the provinces."

"The problem, again, was that there were too many reasons for the war. What conferred a semblance of consistency on this multitude of reasons was, of course, ideology."

"What then, was the real reason for going to war? Strangely, there were, in effect, three: (1) a sincere ideological belief that the USA was bringing democracy and prosperity to another nation; (2) the urge brutally to assert and demonstrate unconditional US hegemony; (3) control of Iraq's oil reserves. Each of the three levels has a relative autonomy of its own, and should not be dismissed as a mere deceptive semblance."

"In autumn 2003, when, after hundreds of investigators had searched high and low for WMDs, yet not a single one had been located, the public were posing the elementary question: 'If there are no WMDs, Why did we attack Iraq? Did you lie to us?'"

"The reason why the U.S. Government must be prosecuted for its war-crimes against Iraq is that they are so horrific and there are so many of them, and international law crumbles until they become prosecuted and severely punished for what they did. We therefore now have internationally a lawless world (or “World Order”) in which “Might makes right,” and in which there is really no effective international law, at all. This is merely gangster “law,” ruling on an international level... The seriousness of this international war crime is not as severe as those of the Nazis were, but nonetheless is comparable to it... On 15 March 2018, Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J.S. Davies headlined at Alternet, “The Staggering Death Toll in Iraq” and wrote that “our calculations, using the best information available, show a catastrophic estimate of 2.4 million Iraqi deaths since the 2003 invasion,” and linked to solid evidence, backing up their estimate.... On 6 February 2020, BusinessInsider bannered “US taxpayers have reportedly paid an average of $8,000 each and over $2 trillion total for the Iraq war alone”, and linked to the academic analysis that supported this estimate. The U.S. regime’s invasive war, which the Bush gang perpetrated against Iraq, was also a crime against the American people (though Iraqis suffered far more from it than we did)."

"The man who reacts to the universe with a cry of impotent anguish is acceptable as an artist only if he can persuade us that he has sanely considered the other possible reactions and found them inadequate."

"Bush’s successors have become accessories after the fact, by this failure to press for prosecution of him and his henchmen regarding this grave matter. In fact, the “Defense One” site bannered on 26 September 2018, “US Official: We May Cut Support for Iraq If New Government Seats Pro-Iran Politicians”, and opened with “The Trump administration may decrease U.S. military support or other assistance to Iraq if its new government puts Iranian-aligned politicians in any ‘significant positions of responsibility,’ a senior administration official told reporters late last week.” The way that the U.S. regime has brought ‘democracy’ to Iraq is by threatening to withdraw its protection of the stooge-rulers that it had helped to place into power there, unless those stooges do the U.S. dictators’ bidding, against Iraq’s neighbor Iran. This specific American dictator, Trump, is demanding that majority-Shiite Iraq be run by stooges who favor, instead, America’s fundamentalist-Sunni allies, such as the Saud family who own Saudi Arabia and who hate and loathe Shiites and Iran. The U.S. dictatorship insists that Iraq, which the U.S. conquered, serve America’s anti-Shiite and anti-Iranian policy-objectives."

"I do not want to criticize while my soldiers are still bleeding and dying in Iraq."