Valerie Plame Quotes

The Iraq War is an incredibly strategic blunder of enormous proportions …. There was not an exit strategy because the people planning this war didn’t intend to leave.

As many people have chronicled, the decision to fight in Vietnam was a years-long accretion of step-by-step choices, each of which could be rationalized at the time. Invading Iraq was an unforced, unnecessary decision to risk everything on a 'war of choice' whose costs we are still paying.

It was not in our interest to enter Iraq in the first place.

That was not part of the U.N. resolution; it was not part of the mandate to go on to Baghdad and, frankly, if we had gone into Baghdad and pushed Saddam Hussein off, we would have inherited an even bigger mess than the mess we inherited with the refugee problem.

It's also much clearer how much damage the occupation of Iraq is doing to America's reputation and prestige around the world; and that's just starting now to hit home in the United States.

The Iraq War has been the most dangerous and costly foreign policy debacle in our nation’s history.

I'm one of the ones who believed the Iraq War was a complete mistake from the very beginning.

Could you imagine if the U.N. had endorsed the war in Iraq, what our reputation would be like?

I think one can easily make a case for taking out Saddam Hussein. In fact, one could probably be made on humanitarian grounds alone. But just as there's a downside risk to doing nothing about this man, there is a very serious downside risk to invading the country.

The historic lesson is that it was a strategic failure to go into Iraq. History will not be and should not be kind with that decision.

The 2003 war in Iraq may be considered the greatest error in American policy since the Civil War. Its ramifications are earth-shattering and will impact us and our safety for generations. It may completely unravel the entire Middle East forever.

I profoundly do not believe that the United States could make things better in Syria by being there. And we have an evidentiary record of what happens when we're there - nearly a decade in Iraq.

The war in Iraq, clearly has not turned out in the way that was hoped.

We, Britain and Germany, can neither of us be happy about our handling of the Iraq war.

The war in Iraq has been extremely divisive here at home, and has also divided the world community.

I will listen to Mr Bush but my position is very clear and very firm. The occupation is a fiasco. There have been almost more deaths after the war than during the war.

If the Americans go in and overthrow Saddam Hussein and it's clean, he has nothing, I will apologize to the nation, and I will not trust the Bush administration again.

The U.S. invaded the wrong country, destroying an odious government that was not responsible for 9/11. I don't know how you recover from invading the wrong country, no matter how you spin it.

I don't think that the war serves U.S. interests. I think Osama bin Laden's interests and the Iranian interests are very much served by it, and it's becoming a huge drain on our resources both material and political.

I hope I'm wrong, but I am afraid that Iraq is going to turn out to be the greatest disaster in American foreign policy - worse than Vietnam, not in the number who died, but in terms of its unintended consequences and its reverberation throughout the region.

I said in October of 2008 that there was no proof that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction or had the intention or capability of attacking the United States. Here we are. Almost 4,700 troops died, tens of thousands injured, over a million Iraqis dead. It will cost $5 trillion in the end for the war.

Had we taken all of Iraq, we would have been like a dinosaur in the tar pit - we would still be there, and we, not the United Nations, would be bearing the costs of that occupation.

We were told by the president that we had no alternative but to go into Iraq because of the threat that Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction posed, but to date, these weapons have not been found.

Could it be that all those reports coming from our own intelligence that Bush ignored was right all along? Could it be that the UN was right all along?

I believe very deeply in the proposition that what we did in Iraq was the right thing to do. It was hard to do. It took a long time. There were significant costs involved.