Iraq Quotes - page 51
![We've spent $400 billion between Iraq and Afghanistan. That amounts to a couple of billion dollars a week. I stood on the floor of Congress begging, trying to get just one billion to fight HIV and AIDS, to be able to fund all the outreach programs. But we're at a time when very smart people have been allowing this dumb-ass President of the United States [George W. Bush] to do as he pleases. (Maxine Waters)](https://cdn.quotesdtb.com/img/quotes_images_webp/90/maxine-waters-able-begging-1016790.webp)
You ask Israel to cease building settlements on the West Bank, which are intended not only to house Israelis, but to provide a defense bulwark when the Islamist armies of the surrounding states, Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria – Assad or his opponents – and Iraq, again try militarily to crush Israel. Will Britain come to Israel's aid? I recall when in one of those wars, Britain declined to deliver to Israel tanks it had purchased from your country. Britain under Chamberlain participated in the Munich sellout of Czechoslovakia. What you and your European colleagues are doing now is repeating the sellout, this time of Israel. The Czech Republic, mindful of what happened to it, is the only European country to vote no to Palestinian statehood. When one of your predecessors told the world that he offered "peace in our time," he wrote himself into history as a disgrace. How will history on this issue recall you? Why would you expect Israel to cooperate in its intended lynching?
Ed Koch
Hitchens: Let me ask a question to Mr. Heston. Can he tell me, clockwise, what countries have frontiers and borders with Iraq, starting from Kuwait?
Charlton Heston: Yes, indeed I can (...). Kuwait, Bahrain, Turkey, Russia ... uh, Iran.
Hitchens: Exactly. You don't know where it is, in other words, do you? You have no idea where the country is on the map, and you're in favour of bombing it now rather than later, on the whim of a president.
Bob Cain: Mr. Hitchens, if I may interject, I'm not sure [about the relevance] of the instantaneous command of the geography of a region.
Hitchens: Oh, I don't know. I think if you're in favour of bombing a country, you might pay it the compliment of knowing where it is.
Christopher Hitchens
I am a sixty-three-year-old war reporter. I have covered wars and madness in Rwanda, Burundi, apartheid South Africa, the Romanian revolution, former Yugoslavia, Iraq, Syria, Albania, Chechnya, Afghanistan and Zimbabwe. I have seen babies with hacked limbs and an old man with his eyes blown in by an artillery shell and people with their lungs sucked inside out and a man with his brain sliced with a machete – and there is nothing worse than watching kids smile in war, watching the aristocracy of the human soul. It makes me cry – and cry I do.
John Sweeney (journalist)
Of course it's possible that there really ISN'T any shadow government. The whole thing could be a phony story that was fed to The Washington Post to mislead our enemies. As you recall, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld recently admitted that the Pentagon had set up an office-officially named "The Office of Disinformation"-that was supposed to put out false statements to the media, thus throwing our enemies off the track. For example, if we were getting ready to attack Iraq, officials of the Office of Disinformation would hold a press conference and state: "Well, we're certainly not going to attack Iraq!" The news media would report this, and Iraq would relax. France, meanwhile, would surrender.
Dave Barry
A lot of people talk about the Israeli lobby, and think that Israel is behind a lot of this. But I've studied it up close... Rather than Israel dictating policy to the United States, a cabal of neoconservatives have used the Israeli lobby as a facilitator. If this was all about Israel dictating policy, we'd have skipped Iraq and gone straight to Iran... The big picture in the Middle East is China... It's about leveraging control over Middle-Eastern and central-Asian oil, in order to dictate the pace of China's economic growth over the next 30 years. Because China's the biggest threat in the eyes of the neoconservatives... that's going to threaten American global economic hegemony... You deal with China indirectly at this point in time because you don't want direct confrontation.
Scott Ritter
Trump might be vulgar and ignorant, but he wasn't responsible for the many disasters America's leaders created. Trump didn't invade Iraq or bail out Wall Street. He didn't lower interest rates to zero, or open the borders, or sit silently by as the manufacturing sector collapsed and the middle class died. You couldn't really know what Trump might do as president, but he didn't do any of that.
Tucker Carlson
To be blunt, we went down that road in Iraq. Thanks to the extraordinary sacrifices of our troops and the determination of our diplomats, we are hopeful about Iraq's future. But regime change there took eight years, thousands of American and Iraqi lives, and nearly a trillion dollars. That is not something we can afford to repeat in Libya.
Barack Obama
By December 2002, the situation in both Venezuela and in Iraq reached crisis points... Then came the news that they had succeeded; Chavez had been ousted.... If Mr. Reich, and the Bush administration were celebrating the coup against Chavez, the party was suddenly cut short. In an amazing turnabout. Chavez regained the upper hand and was back in power less than seventy-two hours later. Unlike Mossadegh in Iran, Chavez had managed to keep the military on his side, despite all attempts to turn its highest-ranking officers against him. In addition, he had the powerful state oil company on his side. Petroleos de Venezuela (PDVSA) defied the thousands of striking workers and made a comeback...
Hugo Chávez
I think that Hugo Chavez of Venezuela might not have survived his presidency... had we not been in Iraq and Afghanistan, that we were so diverted. We - the economic hit men tried to overthrow him, you know, a few years ago and were successful for about 48 hours. But then he had control over the oil company, and he was very, very popular. So he got back into office. At that point, had we not been involved in Iraq, I strongly suspect that we would have done something much more aggressive, as we've done so many other times. When the economic hit men fail, we take more drastic steps. Because we were so involved in Iraq, we didn't do that. This gave great support to all of the other movements in Latin America. And these other candidates, people like Evo Morales, really looked to Hugo Chavez as an example of someone who's had the staying power. He's been able to stay there, despite the fact that the (G.W. Bush) administration has spoken so strongly against him and is so angry.
Hugo Chávez
It should have been the easiest invasion in history, and the incompetence and arrogance of the Pentagon planners turned it into a total catastrophe. So yes, it hasn't worked out the way they wanted, but that has nothing to do with their plans. It would be like saying that Hitler didn't intend to conquer the world because he failed. They actually succeeded in creating an insurgency, which didn't exist, there was no basis for it and no outside support. In fact, the U.S. and Britain were compelled to allow elections. The elections in Iraq are a triumph of mass popular nonviolent resistance. Washington and London tried in every way they could to evade elections. You go back through 2003, there was one after another scheme proposed, to try to avoid elections. But they couldn't do it, there were mass demonstrations, partially led by Ayatollah Sistani. Finally they had to back down, and allow elections. Now they're trying in every way to subvert them.
Noam Chomsky
I think that support for Ukraine's effort to defend itself is legitimate. If it is, of course, it has to be carefully scaled, so that it actually improves their situation and doesn't escalate the conflict, to lead to destruction of Ukraine and possibly beyond sanctions against the aggressor, or appropriate just as sanctions against Washington would have been appropriate when it invaded Iraq, or Afghanistan, or many other cases. [...] However, I still think it's not quite the right question. The right question is: What is the best thing to do to save Ukraine from a grim fate, from further destruction? And that's to move towards a negotiated settlement.
Noam Chomsky
Right now, if you're a respectable writer, you want to write in the main journals, you have to talk about the Russian invasion of Ukraine. You have to call it the ‘unprovoked' Russia invasion of Ukraine. It's a very interesting phrase. It was never used before. You look back at Iraq, which was totally unprovoked, nobody ever called it the unprovoked invasion of Iraq. In fact, I don't know if the term was ever used. If it was it was very marginal. Now, you look it up on google, hundreds of thousands of hits. Every article that comes out has to talk about the unprovoked invasion of Ukraine. Why? Because they know perfectly well it was provoked.
Noam Chomsky
