Wesley Clark Quotes

We had Iraq contained. They couldn’t hurt their neighbors; they couldn’t hurt us. They would fire at our planes now and then but they never hit anything. They were not involved in 9-11. I advised that a small force could take Iraq, but it would take a huge force to prevent the Sunnies and the Shiites from killing each other….I told that to the Joint Chiefs, but I don’t think they were consulted. The President made the decision.

The United States invaded Iraq to gain control of one of the major sources of the world's energy.

It was the right decision to go into Iraq. I supported it at the time; I support it now.

In Iraq, [American administration] said Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction endangering mankind. With this pretext, the U.S. intervened militarily, and all they did is take control over oil fields, and oil wells.

The administration took care of a source of instability in Iraq. Envision a world in which Saddam Hussein was rushing for a nuclear weapon to compete against Iran. My decision to remove Saddam Hussein was the correct decision in my judgment. We didn't find the weapons we thought we would find or the weapons everybody thought he had. But he was a significant source of instability.

Iraq was invaded to secure Israel and everybody knows it.

Prior to 9-11, we did not have a single intelligence agent inside Iraq.

Thinking back, I now wonder if our mistake may have been in not considering whether the reason Saddam Hussein was so secretive about his weapons of mass destruction capabilities was not because he had the weapons and wanted to conceal them, but because he did not have them and he wanted to hide that.

Should President Clinton have killed Osama bin Laden when he had the opportunity in 1990s? Should President Bush have sent the U.S. military into Iraq to depose Saddam Hussein in 2003? Should President Obama have withdrawn all troops from Iraq in 2011? Such questions provide no real insight into future considerations.

Undersecretary of Defense Doug Feith was equally insistent in 2002-2003 about an operational relationship between al Qaeda and the Iraqi government.

The Iranians had to come to the forefront of supporting and helping Iraq fight Daesh with advisers, with other help, logistical support for our armed forces, and we very much welcomed that.

The liberation of Iraq is a crucial advance in the campaign against terror. We've removed an ally of al Qaeda.

Iran has proxies in Yemen, Syria, Iraq. You can push back against Iran without pulling out of the deal.

America went into Iraq. We shouldn't have gone into Iraq. We shouldn't have gotten out the way we got out. The world is a total mess.

Afghanistan would have been difficult enough without Iraq. Iraq made it impossible. The argument that had we just focused on Afghanistan we'd now be okay is persuasive, but it omits the fact that we weren't supposed to get involved in nation-building in Afghanistan.

When the United States invaded Iraq, a New York Times/CBS News survey estimated that 42 percent of the American public believed that Saddam Hussein was directly responsible for the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. And an ABC news poll said that 55 percent of Americans believed that Saddam Hussein directly supported al-Qaeda. None of this opinion is based on evidence (because there isn’t any).

It was an agreement between Saddam (Hussein) and the shah of Iran and not between Iraq and Iran.

I believe that President [George W.] Bush was correct. I thought that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, and I supported him steadfastly, and once we committed we should see it through.

The American administration is trying to achieve any gain in the shadow of the embarrassment hitting it because of its failures in Iraq, Afghanistan and Palestine after the failure of Israel's war on Lebanon and the retreat of America's project in the region.

Would the Iraq War have occurred without WMD? I doubt it.

Make no mistake about it: Operation Desert Storm truly was a victory of good over evil, of freedom over tyranny, of peace over war.

I was talking about [Donald] Trump and certain things he was saying, that he wanted to go into Iraq and just "take the oil." I said he sounded like the Corleone Family from The Godfather, you know, "Let's just get it all while we got the muscle."

The war with Iraq ... had to be one of the greatest non sequiturs in military history. Attacked by a gang composed largely of Islamic militants from Saudi Arabia, the United States countered by invading an unrelated country, and one of the most secular in the Middle East at that.

I've said before: If Osama bin Laden was a Christian, Iraq was the Christmas present he always wanted but never expected his parents to give. It validated for the Muslim world virtually all of bin Laden's rhetoric. He had always said the Americans will destroy any strong Muslim regime, and we did.

There was no such thing as Al Qaeda in Iraq, until George Bush and John McCain decided to invade Iraq.