Quotes About Iraq

I think Americans understand that in Afghanistan, unlike in Iraq and Vietnam, we are fighting an enemy allied with the people who attacked us on 9/11.

One of the sharp parallels is that neither Vietnam nor Iraq was the slightest threat to America's national security.

It is a fact that the Left routinely resists, then as now: Americans fought and died in Vietnam for freedom, just as they are doing in Iraq and Afghanistan today. Whatever mistakes generals and policymakers have made along the way cannot detract from that essential truth - which should be a part of any reliable history.

Fiction is a very powerful tool for teaching history. The Philippines was the first Iraq, the first Vietnam, the first Afghanistan, in the sense that it was the United States' initial or baptismal experience in nation-building.

American failures in Vietnam and Iraq suggest that it's not really possible to create and sustain a proxy government in a country far from our own borders.

Since 1945, no one in the U.S. military has liked the end result of the military conflicts we've been in: Vietnam, Korea, certainly Iraq, and probably Afghanistan. But in a democracy, you salute.

Vietnam and Iraq are part of the same national trauma and delusion; we folded the war up when Reagan became president and unpacked it with Bush.

Vietnam was a terrible mistake for the United States. But like Iraq, Vietnam was a badly chosen battlefield in a larger conflict with totalitarianism that America had no choice but to pursue.

The Vietnam War and the Iraq war, in different ways, both made me feel like I could not not address them. I'm very doubtful about the usefulness of poetry to do that.

One big, glaring difference I can think of between Iraq and Vietnam is the news coverage. During the Vietnam War era, you had TV coverage of the war saturating the airwaves every night, and that coverage wasn't put through a military filter at all.

Well, the right-wing policy with regard to Israel - the people who don't want to deal with Arafat, who don't want a Palestinian state - the whole sort of right-wing view is consistent with the view toward Iraq. It's the same policy and the same people.

The view that we hold in Iraq now is this - that democracy is associated with elections. I believe that elections are possible.

Trying to teach creativity is the major hoax of our time along with the Iraq war and plastic surgery.

Democracy still has a real hope and chance in Iraq, and true freedom in this country would be the greatest testament to those who gave their lives for it

I'm amazed at the courage of the journalists on the frontlines in Iraq, but we need intellectual courage in our community.

The death rate among Marines in Iraq has been more than double that of the other services.

Western powers have learned a related and painful lesson in Iraq and Afghanistan: change imposed by force rarely produces the desired results. Likewise, a faith that matters grows best from the ground up, working its way through society gradually, without coercion.

I went to Iraq in 2004 because I believe in doing my duty, not because I agreed with the war.

Sports can unify the Iraqi people - no Sunnis, no Shiites, just sport for the country.

With Saddam gone, any voting would install a Shiite majority. The Sunni wouldn't run Iraq again. That, at the bottom, caused the insurgency. Absent the genocide of Sunni Arabs, it would keep it going.

In the summer of 2003, facing a lengthy Iraq counterinsurgency, the U.S. Army bit the bullet. One-year unit rotations became the rule.

The President's speech suggested to me that were we to follow his leadership, we will be in Iraq not for months, but for years. I also hope I am wrong on this.

Well, this is an unfortunate part of the UN institution. It's the - the theater of the absurd. It doesn't only cast Israel as the villain; it often casts real villains in leading roles: Gadhafi's Libya chaired the UN Commission on Human Rights; Saddam's Iraq headed the UN Committee on Disarmament.

In my judgment, based on the work that has been done to this point of the Iraq Survey Group, and in fact, that I reported to you in October, Iraq was in clear violation of the terms of U.N.Resolution 1441.