"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."

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

"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]"

"[Archival footage] We don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud."

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

"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."

"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."

"[Archival footage] ...said one was guerrilla war, another was insurgency. Another was unconventional war. [Man calls out; "quagmires?"] Pardon me? No, that's someone else's business, quagmires. I don't do quagmires."

"[Archival footage] Think what's happened in our cities when we've had riots and problems... and looting. Stuff happens!"

"[Archival footage] I picked up a newspaper today... and I couldn't believe it. I read eight headlines... that talked about... "Chaos!" "Violence!" "Unrest!" and it just was Henny Penny, the sky is falling!"

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

"Did General Shinseki get it right? He was asked for his best military opinion. And his experience exceeds mine. He commanded our forces in Bosnia. He did it for a year-plus. He knows what he's talking about."

"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."

"Samantha Power, author of A Problem From Hell, professor at Harvard Kennedy School at Harvard University, and U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations from 2013–17"

"The secretary's frustration, along with my own, grew as we watched our careful planning, our detailed planning, essentially discarded, and the people who had been involved in it essentially discarded, so that more loyal, in line with the Republican Party's views, and so forth, people could be appointed to key positions in Iraq."

"There are nights when I don't sleep very well."

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

"I wasn't in my office but two hours. A young M.P. comes to see me, and he goes, "Colonel Hughes, I've got some Iraqi officers that want to meet with you." And I was thinking to myself, "Holy cow. What do I tell these guys?" So I finally came downstairs and met with them in the rotunda of the Republican Palace. Colonel Meijan says, "Colonel Paul, what happened?" And I said to him, "I don't know what happened. I have no idea how this came about." And he said, "All these soldiers. They now have no recourse. They have no money coming to them. What are they supposed to do?""

"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.""

"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."

"All what was written was keeping in this library. Now we have no national heritage."

"They executed them for being Sunni. We have been living together until this. This is an Iranian wave against us! An Iranian wave! We are Muslims! How is this possible?! They say they are the Mahdi Army. Is this what the Mahdi Army does? Look at what he's become. [Referring to the corpses in coffins] Look at what he's become! Open the sack! Let them see his face!"

"The museum was never protected. It is a property of our nation, and the treasure of 7,000 years of civilization. Why do they allow it? Iraq's National Library and National Archives... containing thousands of ancient manuscripts... were burnt down."

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

"[Passionately gesticulating in the street, repeatedly] No Saddam...!"

"There was an awful lot of thinking at State Department. There were board-feet of volumes on how we should do this. And almost none of this was integrated into the Pentagon's thinking."

"On May 1, 2003, President George W. Bush declared an end to major combat operations in Iraq and said, "In the battle of Iraq, the United States and our allies have prevailed." Four years later, after over 3,000 American deaths and over 20,000 American wounded, Iraq has disintegrated into chaos. Millions of Iraqis have lost access to drinking water, sewage treatment and electricity since the invasion. Baghdad, a city of six million, has been under an 8 p.m. curfew since March of 2006. Over three million Iraqis have fled to neighboring countries. Estimates of the civilian death toll range as high as 600,000. Iraq's two major Muslim groups, the Shiite majority and Sunni minority, are increasingly at war. A month after September 11th, the United States entered Afghanistan in search of al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden. But even before the Afghan war, several senior administration officials were looking at another target, one that had nothing to do with the 9/11 attacks."

"The 1991 armistice requires Iraq to disarm. but Saddam refuses to comply. As a results Iraq's economy crumbles under a UN embargo instituted in 1993 and continued by the Clinton administration Saddam's favored elite remain wealthy but ordinary Iraqis are plunged into extreme poverty and many turned fundamentalist Islam. In 1993, when George Bush senior visits Kuwait... Saddam attempts to assassinate him. Seven years later, his son is elected president of the US."

"There is a large number of former Iraqi soldiers that are unemployed now. That is a huge concern, not only from a security standpoint, but from an economic standpoint. They're not earning an income right now."

"It's hard to conceive that it would take more forces to provide stability in post-Saddam Iraq than it would take to conduct the war itself and to secure the surrender of Saddam's security forces in his army. Hard to imagine."

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

"Secretary Powell and, to the same extent, myself, we argued for more and more troops. And we made some difference. But ultimately, it didn't seem that we made enough of a difference."

"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|"

"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."

"George W. Bush's foreign policy inner circle - Cheney, Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz - set the administration on course for war with Iraq. Condoleezza Rice sided with them. Colin Powell and Richard Armitage - the only senior officials with combat experience - expressed concerns privately, but supported the administration in public."

"The Iraq National Museum in Baghdad... number one on ORHA's list... contained some of the worlds most important artefacts... of early human civilization."

"General Jay Garner, who briefly ran the reconstruction of Iraq before being replaced by L. Paul Bremer"

"Ambassador Barbara Bodine, who was briefly in charge of the Baghdad embassy in spring 2003"

"In formulating its views on post-Saddam Iraq, the administration relied heavily on a man named Ahmed Chalabi. Since 1992, Chalabi had been president of Iraqi National Congress, or INC. Widely viewed with suspicion, Chalabi had been convicted in Jordan of a huge bank fraud. The intelligence community found his information unreliable, or even fraudulent."

"Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, Colin Powell's former chief of staff"

"During World War Two, the United States started planning the occupation of Germany two years in advance. But the Bush administration didn't created the organization that would manage the occupation of Iraq until 60 days before the invasion. ORHA, the organization for Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance reported directly to defense Secretary Rumsfeld."

"George Packer, author of The Assassins' Gate"

"[Archival footage] The great respect that I have for you Mister President... in this little understood, unfamiliar... war. The first war of the 21st century. It is not well known, it is not well understood, it's complex for people to comprehend. I know, with certainty, to come to the contributions you've made, will be recorded in history."

"[Archival footage] There is another way for the bloodshed to stop... and that is for the Iraqi military and the Iraqi people... to take matters into their own hands and force Saddam Hussein, the dictator.... to step aside..."

"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."

"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."

"The '80s really summed up, in a very foretelling document from 1987, it said, uh; "Human rights and chemical weapons use aside..." uh, comma, [glances upwards in a tic of humorous observance] "...our interests run roughly parallel to those of Iraq."

"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."