Juan Cole 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.

Faced with the collapse of Iraq into something like Lebanon - or worse, Somalia - the Bush administration opted for a new counterinsurgency strategy. Violence was reduced because, for the first time since the U.S. invaded Iraq in 2003, Iraqis felt that there was a force capable of dominating the situation and ensuring basic order.

The Americans stabbed in the back the forces that worked to bring about the collapse of Saddam's regime and wanted to keep Iraq a sovereign country.

You can’t separate the struggle against the Baathists (of Iraq) from the struggle against global terrorism.

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

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.

When Americans invade Iraq, Bush says, we will be greeted as liberators by the Iraqi people, proving that taking out Saddam Hussein was the right thing to do.

The first time I went to Iraq was October 2002, when Saddam was still in power, and then, subsequently, in January of 2003, about three-and-a-half months before the U.S. invasion. So, I got to see the before and after of Iraq, basically, before and after the war.

We've thrown out Saddam and Saddam, dead or alive, is finished in Iraq.

Well, I think it's too early to call Fallujah a failure.

Once we destroyed the Saddam regime, we knew there was going to be a civil war.

To the contrary, I believe the U.S. military has already done all that has been asked of them. Saddam Hussein is on trial. The threat from alleged weapons of mass destruction programs in Iraq has been neutralized.

I, for one, begin with intent. There is no question that, Saddam Hussein had intent to do harm to the Western alliance and to the United States of America.

America responded to the 9-11 attacks by invading Iraq, only to discover that Saddam Hussein had palaces of mass luxury, not weapons of mass destruction.

I think a weakened, fragmented, chaotic Iraq, which could happen if this isn’t done carefully, is more dangerous in the long run than a contained Saddam is now.

The main reason the Americans have come to Iraq is to put down the Shiite people—to prevent us from setting up a Shiite religious government.

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

By the end of 2008, clearly the Al Qaeda and Sunni insurgency had been relatively stabilized. And in the Al Qaeda's mind, they were defeated.

The 2003 invasion of Iraq by U.S. and coalition partners stands as one of the greatest blunders in American history. The Islamic State, also known as ISIL or ISIS, rose out of the the chaos, throwing the region into turmoil that hasn't been equaled since the fall of the Ottoman Empire.

From almost the first day they got into office, they (President Bush and Vice President Cheney) were trying to figure out how to get rid of Saddam Hussein. I'm not a psychiatrist - I don't know all of the reasons behind their concern, some might say their obsession.

The United States of America, justifiably and proudly, went to war in Afghanistan in early winter of 2001. The United States invaded Iraq on a false premise in the spring of 2003.

When the United States first went into Afghanistan in 2001, it devastated the Taliban and Al Qaeda in a matter of weeks using only a few hundred C.I.A. and Special Operations personnel, backed by American air power. Later, when the United States transitioned to conventional Pentagon stability operations, this success was reversed.

For goodness' sakes, back in 2006, when we were about to lose the battle in Iraq, thank goodness our patriots fought in the Anbar province and Fallujah and turned that thing around.

The illegal 2003 invasion had little to do with liberating Iraqis from Saddam Hussein's dictatorship. Instead, the real freedoms and benefits were destined to go to corporations like Halliburton and others that stood to gain from the privatisation of the formerly state-owned Iraqi economy.

After the invasion of Afghanistan, when the focus suddenly turned toward Iraq, I suddenly thought, 'What on earth had Iraq got to do with the war on terror?'