Lynsey Addario Quotes
I had first visited Kurdistan in 2003 before the invasion of Iraq, camping out in Erbil and Sulaimaniya while waiting for Saddam Hussein's fall.
Addario, Lynsey. It's What I Do: A Photographer's Life of Love and War. Penguin Press, 2015.
His balanced judgment and concern for American Casualties changed during the Iraq War over a decade later where he insisted on taking steady American casualties even after Saddam had been deposed and American troops were in the middle of a sectarian civil war.
The British had sent troops to Iraq expecting to be greeted by a grateful population who would then obtain relief from the warring factions which had destabilized the area. However, in a historical precursor to the George W. Bush invasion of Iraq, the British troops became the targets for all sides in the complex power struggle of the area. Hence Churchill’s description as an “ungrateful volcano”. At the time, the oil of Iraq had not been discovered and England was the world’s largest superpower.
Ironically Germany which has publicly usually been so sensitive and responsible after their massive chemical extermination in the concentration camps of WWII, was embarrassed by their own private companies which, to make money, sold the chemicals and the technology to the then worst murderer in the world.
This statement was made in the first phase of the Iraq war where Cheney and President Bush thought the war was won. After that there were thousands of Americans killed in the war. Critics of the administration war policy threw this quotation up to him.
In 2002, President George W. Bush, determined to invade Iraq and bring democracy to the Muslim Middle East, reported that Iraq had stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction and were very close to a nuclear bomb. They had even used biological weapons against Iran and the Kurdish minority in Iraq. The president claimed that the evidence was incontrovertible and removed those generals who questioned the wisdom of an Iraq invasion and besmirched the character and patriotism of those civilian officials and figures who questioned the evidence or its sources. After the invasion, it turned out that there were not only no stockpiles of WMD but there was no capability to manufacture WMD as had existed before the Gulf War. Bush claimed he was misled by the CIA and other intelligence operatives. It turned out that the Vice President and other administration officials only examined the intelligence which supported their justification for war.
In this remarkable quotation, the king whose own invasion by Iraq was only stopped by American troops in the Gulf War, tells the Arab world that the American occupation which was endorsed by the Iraqi government was illegal. Many others in the world and even many in the U. S. agreed about the illegality, but the King claims to be one of the major allies and supporters of the United States. What he says for Arab and Islamic consumption is different from what he tells American and other Western diplomats. See {620141} for another example.
This was one of the many major weaknesses of our Intelligence Agencies.
Lynsey Addario is an American photojournalist. Her work often focuses on conflicts and human rights issues, especially the role of women in traditional societies.
