Bill O'Reilly Quotes

There's a certain amount of sympathy here for the Bush administration's problem, which is they would like to get rid of Saddam Hussein and they would like to have the Kurds autonomous.

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

Whatever one wants to say about the conduct of the Iraq War, going to war to remove Saddam Hussein in 2003 was a necessary act. It should and could have been done earlier, had not the Clinton White House, which understood the need, not wasted the opportunity through timidity and bluster.

The mistake that was made was, of course, leaving Saddam in charge of affairs over there.

That was not part of the U.N. resolution; it was not part of the mandate to go on to Baghdad and, frankly, if we had gone into Baghdad and pushed Saddam Hussein off, we would have inherited an even bigger mess than the mess we inherited with the refugee problem.

We should not have attacked Iraq without the okay of the United Nations. Now we have to live with that mistake. We're living with it, and too many of our guys are dying with it.

Let's be clear: Neither Secretary Powell or I opposed the notion of removing Saddam Hussein by force, but we wanted to avoid the war if we could. But if we couldn't, the notion of removing Saddam Hussein from the scene seemed eminently sensible, given that you had, what, 16 or so U.N. Security Council resolutions basically saying the same thing.

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.

It is now conventional wisdom that Americans do not care why we went to war in Iraq, that it is enough that the world is better off without Saddam Hussein.

Had the decision belonged to Senator Kerry, Saddam hussein would still be in power today in Iraq. In fact, Saddam Hussein would almost certainly still be in control of Kuwait.

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.

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

I did more than anyone else in persuading the U.S. to get rid of Saddam.

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.

Saddam Hussein was the one person after whom the United States went, and they ruined the country.

The war in Iraq will end, our troops will come home, Bush will be impeached and he will be brought to justice.

Put simply, the Bush administration policy in the Middle East is continuing to fail.

The Pentagon still has not given a name to the Iraqi war. Somehow 'Operation Re-elect Bush' doesn't seem to be popular.

The reason the United States is not so likely to invade Iran is precisely because of the lessons learned from Iraq. And conversely, the Iranian push towards nuclear capability is calculated to deter invasions like the kind deposing Saddam Husain.

Even before September 11, there was a debate in the administration about whether or not military force should be used to oust Saddam Hussein. You're not going to find one person in the top echelons of the foreign policy and national security establishment in the U.S. government who's going to say that Saddam Hussein should not be out of power.

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

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

We realize too late that President Bush shouldn't have taken us into Iraq, and President Obama shouldn't have taken us out.

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.

Mission accomplished? The mission in Iraq, as laid out by President Bush and Vice President Cheney, has failed.