Joe Lieberman Quotes

What we need now is not just a regime change in Saddam Hussein and Iraq, but we need a regime change in the United States.

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.

It's now clear that from the very moment President Bush took office, Iraq was his highest priority as unfinished business from the first Bush Administration. His agenda was clear: find a rationale to get rid of Saddam.

My goal in Baghdad was to facilitate a debate here in the United States on America's policy toward Iraq, a debate that's been sadly lacking.

By linking these countries together in his 'axis of evil' speech, President Bush implied an identity between them not only in terms of their threat, but also in terms of the action necessary to deal with the threat. A lot of work will now need to be done to delink the three, and to show why military action against Iraq is so much more justified than against Iran and North Korea.

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.

The burden is on Saddam Hussein. And our policy, our national policy - not the UN policy but our national policy - is that the regime should be changed until such time as he demonstrates that it is not necessary to change the regime because the regime has changed itself.

In a speech earlier today President Bush said if Iraq gets rid of Saddam Hussein, he will help the Iraqi people with food, medicine, supplies, housing, education - anything that's needed. Isn't that amazing? He finally comes up with a domestic agenda - and it's for Iraq. Maybe we could bring that here if it works out.

I think it was the right decision to disarm Saddam Hussein. And when the president made the decision, I supported him, and I support the fact that we did disarm him.

They are having a panel look into the intelligence failures in Iraq. It is a seven-person panel and it will include Senator John McCain, but the findings from this panel will not be issued until after the election. President Bush says the commission can go off and report back in a year, you know, the same way it works in the Texas National Guard.

I think the problem with John Bolton is he disagrees with President Trump's foreign policy. He would be closer to John McCain's foreign policy. John Bolton still believes the Iraq war was a good idea. He still believes that regime change is a good idea. He still believes that nation-building is a good idea.

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 attack on Iraq has been long planned. There just hasn't been an excuse for it. Since George H.W. Bush didn't unseat Saddam in 1991, there's been a longing among the extreme right in the United States to finish the job. The war on terrorism has given them that opportunity. Even though the logic is convoluted and fraudulent, it appears they are going to go ahead and finish the job.

I personally think that today, Iraq without Saddam Hussein is a truly better Iraq than with Saddam Hussein. But, naturally, I also feel uncomfortable due to the fact that we were misled with the information on weapons of mass destruction.

[Hillary Clinton] was saying, "We never going to do anything in Iraq, we're not going to do anything in Syria." Enemies, do whatever you want. Continue the largest humanitarian crisis, 7 million people displaced refugees. Do all this. We're not going to do anything. That is the type of stuff that is been happening for the past 7 1/2 years under President [Barack] Obama.

In response to the escalating violence in Iraq, President Bush is delaying the return home of 25,000 troops and will actually add reinforcements to the south. Then in a symbolic gesture he pulled down the mission accomplished banner, put on a flight suit, walked backwards to a jet fighter and flew it in reverse off an aircraft carrier.

The truth is France has been the chief Western advocate of normalizing relations with Iraq - one of its largest trading partners - for years, partly because France holds billions in IOUs from Iraq that wouldn't be redeemable by a new regime.

Liberating Iraq would be a cakewalk.

It was President [Bill] Clinton and the United States congress in 1998 which said that the regime has to be changed because the regime would not give up its weapons of mass destruction. We came into office in 2001 and kept that policy because Saddam Hussein had not changed.

Iraq may still have a decent outcome...but even if it becomes Switzerland, we overpaid for it.

I did not support Operation Desert Fox.

The administration does not agree with those who suggest we should deploy hundreds of thousands of American troops to engage militarily in a ground war in Iraq.

I certainly have no regrets about overthrowing Saddam Hussein. I'd do it again. And, yes, there are a lot of things that I think we'd all do differently. Maybe we made some erroneous assumptions about the fabric of the society in Iraq and about the solidity of some of the institutions. And yes, there are a lot of things I would do differently. I'd probably work to rebuild Iraq from the outside in, rather than concentrating so much on Baghdad, for instance.

President Obama is sending a couple hundred troops to Iraq. We spent six years trying to figure a way to get out of Iraq. And now we're back. But this time there is an exit strategy. Barack Obama has an exit strategy. In 2016, he's gone.

There was no such thing as Al Qaeda in Iraq, until George Bush and John McCain decided to invade Iraq.