Ed Balls Quotes
It was a mistake. On the information we had, we shouldn't have prosecuted the war. We shouldn't have changed our argument from international law to regime change in a non-transparent way. It was an error for which we as a country paid a heavy price, and for which many people paid with their lives.
Balls, Ed. "Speech on Foreign Policy." BBC News, BBC, 13 July 2010.
President Bush claimed that he authorized the invasion because Iraq had developed and were about to deploy weapons of mass destruction. After the invasion, there were no such weapons ever found. Some believe Bush had acted on bad intelligence; others argued that Bush and the neocoms had wanted to invade Iraq for other reasons, and used the bad intelligence knowingly and actually suppressed intelligence that contradicted the hypotheis of weapons readiness.
The George W. Bush Administration told Congress and the people of the world that Iraq had developed weapons of mass destruction and were about to deploy them. We invaded Iraq and it turned out that there were no WMD’s in Iraq. No one knows if the all in the administration honestly believed the intelligence, how many doubted it, and how many others suppressed contradictory evidence of which there was much. Some members of the administration wanted an invasion of Iraq for other reasons, personal and economic.
John E. Puerifoy, the American ambassador to Guatemala
This speech was given 5 months before President Georg W, Bush initiated the invasion of Iraq. Politicians either supported the idea of an Iraq War or simply remained silent lest they be labeled unpatriotic. Obama not only opposed the war, but by 2007 most Americans had also come to believe that Bush’s invasion was a “dumb” and “rash” war.
On March 9-10, 1945, over three hundred B-29 Superfortresses loaded with 2,000 tons of incendiary bombs flew over Tokyo bombing the city in waves for 6 hours. Over 250,000 buildings were destroyed and more people were killed than would be in either Hiroshima or Nagasaki which were destroyed by atomic bombs. See {615730} and {615733}. The technique called area bombing was then implemented on Japanese cities 66 more times. Stimson was seriously worried that there would be no large targets in Japan left on which the dramatic effect of the atomic bomb could be demonstrated. And without such a demonstration, there would not be a likely Japanese surrender as all the devastating conventional bombing had not persuaded the Japanese. A land invasion with perhaps millions of casualties might be required.
Edward Michael Balls is a British broadcaster, writer, economist and former politician who served as Shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer from 2011 to 2015. A member of the Labour Party and Co-operative Party, he was Member of Parliament (MP) for Morley and Outwood, formerly Normanton, from 2005 to 2015.
