"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"John Abizaid and Dave McKiernan were constantly telling me, "How about hurrying up? Let's get the army back. Let's get their army back.""

"I had put people out on the street walking around asking: "Do you know anybody in medicine... ministry of Health...Interior...Education...?""

"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."

"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!"

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

"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."

"[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..."

"[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!"

"[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."

"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."

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

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

"[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."

"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."

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

"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."

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

"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."

"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."

"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."

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

"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."

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

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

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

"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."

"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."

"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]."

"Marc Garlasco, senior Iraq analyst at the Defense Intelligence Agency from 1997–2003"

"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."

"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."

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

"Three days ago... me and the doctor Jabar Khalil... chairman of the State Board of Antiquities, went to the headquarter of the Marine in the Hotel Palestine. We waited there for about four hours... til we met a colonel there. And at that day, he promised that he would send armored cars... to protect what's left from the museum. Three days ago, 'til now nobody came."

"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."

"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."

"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."

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

"Omar Fekeiki, office manager of the Baghdad bureau of The Washington Post"