No End In Sight

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

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

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

"[Archival footage] What I want to bring to your attention today is the potentially much more sinister nexus between Iraq and the al Qaeda terrorist network."

"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."

"If you want to date the beginning of the disaster of post-war Iraq, it would be January 20, 2003, when Bush signed, without - as far as I can tell - any real discussion within the White House or the administration, National Security Presidential Directive No. 24, which gave control of post-war Iraq to the Pentagon. That document essentially made Donald Rumsfeld the main actor on post-war Iraq. And so, the plan was, essentially, we'll stay for three or four months. We will install a government made up of exiles and led by Ahmed Chalabi. And then, in August or September of 2003, we will begin a drastic reduction of troops."

"The Iraqis were... waiting to see what was this was going to bring them. The presence of the Americans had not been rejected yet, by the Iraqis."

"Hard to imagine." Anyone who had any experience in the interventions of the '90s knew that the opposite was true. You need X numbers of soldiers per 1,000 citizens, simply to provide a modicum of security. But Paul Wolfowitz couldn't imagine it."

"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.""

"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?""

"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."

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

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

"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."

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

"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...?""

"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."

"We're talking about post hostilities, control over a piece of geography that's fairly significant, with the kinds of ethnic tensions that could lead to other problems. And so, it takes significant ground force presence."

"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."

"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."

"People who die, are lucky, but people living, are dead while they are alive."

"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."

"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."

"When I say goodbye to my husband, I think I'm not coming back."

"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."

"If Iraq goes back to some sort of Islamo-fascist regime like we had in under the Taliban in Afghanistan, then we are back to September the 10th, 2001, except, a much larger scale, and you know, with billions of dollars of oil money in their disposal"

"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"

"Richard Armitage, United States Deputy Secretary of State from 2001-5"

"Robert Hutchings, former chairman of the National Intelligence Council"

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

"Col. Paul Hughes, who worked in the ORHA and then the CPA and currently serves as a senior advisor to the U.S. Institute of Peace"

"George Packer, author of The Assassins' Gate"

"Chris Allbritton, journalist and blogger for Time magazine"

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

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

"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"

"James Fallows, author of Blind into Baghdad, national editor at The Atlantic"

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

"Ali Fadhil, an Iraqi journalist"

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

"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"

"David Yancey, specialist, Military Police, U.S. Army"

"Hugo Gonzales, field artillery gunner, U.S. Army"

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