Jay Parini Quotes

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.

Iraq did nothing to us. Iraq was not responsible for 9/11.

It was pretty clear in 2002 to anyone in the intelligence community that is where we were headed.[To war with Iraq].

My journalistic mission was straightforward: to await the U.S. invasion of Iraq. Nobody knew quite when this would be. But the diplomacy - the meetings in the U.N. security council, the allegations about weapons of mass destruction, the martial language of Tony Blair and George W. Bush - all suggested a war was brewing.

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.

President Bush comes up with a reason a day as to why we are in Iraq.

I think the Bush Administration was bound and determined on regime change, and we will be paying the price of that for some time to come.

The decision to attack Iraq in March 2003 was discretionary; it was a war of choice.

We went into Iraq because Saddam Hussein refused to account for his weapons of mass destruction, consistently violated UN resolutions and in a post-9/11 world no American president could afford to give Saddam Hussein the benefit of the doubt.

The only one who thinks the world is safer since the occupation of Iraq is Bush.

The Second World War is and was constantly being drudged up by Blair and Bush to rationalize the invasion of Iraq.

I think Tony Blair has to come down on one side or the other. You can't be a half-hearted supporter of the possible attack on Iraq. You're either with George Bush or you're against him.

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.

Well, what I've said is that the war in Iraq will always be clouded by how it began, which was a wrong premise, that there were in fact no weapons of nuclear - weapons of mass destruction.

The first weekend after the attacks of September 11, George W. Bush had a meeting at Camp David with his top advisors, including Colin Powell, the secretary of state. And there was a lively debate about Iraq policy, in which some people from the Pentagon were arguing that the war against terrorism should include Saddam Hussein.

Think of what happened after 9/11, the minute before there was any assessment, there was glee in the administration because now we can invade Iraq, and so the war drums beat.

We did not go to war in Afghanistan or in Iraq to, quote, 'impose democracy.' We went to war in both places because we saw those regimes as a threat to the United States.

Unless the president can make a very compelling case that Saddam Hussein has his finger on a weapon of mass destruction and is about ready to use it, I do not think that now is the time to go to war against Saddam Hussein.

I would have voted 'no' on the Iraq war and 'yes' to Afghanistan.

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.

Neoconservative Republican President George W. Bush took office determined to aggressively export American democratic values through conflict. The Iraq war, a misdirected response to 9/11, tacked trillions of dollars on to the deficit while further destabilising the Middle East.

We have concluded that the U.K. chose to join the invasion of Iraq before the peaceful options for disarmament had been exhausted. Military action at that time was not a last resort.

The best power of all is to be free, but Obama is not a free person. He is a prisoner of a military system. He talked about closing Guantanamo and ending the war in Iraq. Now he's taken on another war. What's happening?

I'm saying 9/11 was to get us into Iraq and get us into Afghanistan.

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