"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."

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

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

"[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."

"[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."

"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!"

"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."

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

"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."

"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."

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

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

"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."

"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."

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

"The north and the west parts are controlled by the insurgents."

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

"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."

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

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

"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."

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

"[Archival footage] His regime aids and protects terrorists, including members of Ạl Qạedạ."

"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?""

"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."

"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]."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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]"

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

"Amatzia Baram (as Amazia Baram), professor of Middle East history, former advisor to the Bush Administration"

"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."

"It was such a confusing, loud, noisy, scary, hopeless place, and it was all put together. I'd see kids with ski caps on that said FBI on it and others would be giving me the big thumbs up. And you'd have other young men who probably fedayeen in civilian clothes giving me very hard stares... and... and... you know, always trying to size me up and always covering up the license plate of the car."

"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."

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

"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."

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

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

"Walter B. Slocombe, Senior Advisor for Security and Defense to the CPA"

"God, country, family, right?"

"[whispers to himself as he points his rifle at an Iraqi boy carrying an RPG launcher] Don't pick it up... [pause] Drop it! [his finger starts trembling on the trigger. The boy eventually drops the RPG and he sighs in relief]"

"Leonard Roberts - Instructor Roll"