Juan Cole Quotes

Iraq is not about oil.

The U.S. and Britain are incapable of controlling all of Iraq.

War is God's way of teaching Americans geography.

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

The Iraqi war has transformed the Middle East.

I regret that on my arrival in Mesopotamia I was too much occupied with military matters, and too ill-informed regarding the political problem….[We had] a scratch and somewhat incongruous team of administrators with the majority possessing little exact knowledge of the people they were called upon to monitor

Whether you think we belong in Iraq or not, we can’t tune it out.

There was no terrorism in the Middle East until Washington brought it there with invasions, bombings, and torture.

In 2001, we were told that the war in Afghanistan was a feminist mission. The marines were liberating Afghan women from the Taliban. Can you really bomb feminism into a country? And now, after 25 years of brutal war - 10 years against the Soviet occupation, 15 years of US occupation - the Taliban is riding back to Kabul and will soon be back to doing business with the United States.

As we head to war with Iraq, President Bush wants to make one thing clear: This war is not about oil. It's about gasoline.

These people are trying to shake the will of the Iraqi citizens, and they want us to leave...I think the world would be better off if we did leave.

The war in Iraq was unwinnable.

I supported the Iraq resolution, but that was not an approval of war in Iraq and certainly was not approval for an occupation of Iraq.

A war between Europeans is a civil war.

Finland had a civil war less than 100 years ago, just like in Ireland. If you look at the history of newly independent nations, civil war is almost every time present, even in the United States.

There was the situation in Nicaragua where the Sandinistas had taken over a couple of years earlier. There was a civil war going on in El Salvador and there was a similar situation in Guatemala. So Honduras was in a rather precarious geographic position indeed.

Let us recollect that peace or war will not always be left to our option; that however moderate or unambitious we may be, we cannot count upon the moderation, or hope to extinguish the ambition of others.

We came to Iraq to liberate them and to make our world a safer place.

So a truthful assessment of how America is doing in the war on terror as a result of President Bush's war on Iraq is that we have been set back by decades.

I'm sure it is, I'm not for any kind of war, we've been engaged in several wars since the second world war and we lost in Korea, we lost in Vietnam, they are political wars, they have nothing to do with any real threat, nor does this one.

Of course, I'm drawn to a place like Iraq because It's the biggest story of our generation.

Experience has shown how deeply the seeds of war are planted by economic rivalry and social injustice.

I beg Osama to stop warring. He is a Muslim, and Islam means peace. Nobody wins in a war... I wish I were tapped in the problem about Iraq. I knew Saddam enough that I could have talked him into surrendering. But it's too late.

We have war when at least one of the parties to a conflict wants something more than it wants peace.

We are muddled into war.