Zbigniew Brzezinski Quotes

I think we've, again, got to be extremely careful; otherwise we'll misunderstand what's going on in Iraq and in Syria today. Of course, you can't say that those of us who removed Saddam in 2003 bear no responsibility for the situation in 2015.

The invasion only made matters worse. The occupation will not work, Iraq is unoccupiable, that will not work.

The war in Iraq, clearly has not turned out in the way that was hoped.

We make mistakes in every war and serious mistakes were made here.

Both Presidents George Bush and Barack Obama pursued policies of regime change after 9/11 - with Bush removing al-Qaida's safe haven in Afghanistan and the sadistic anti-American dictator Saddam Hussein in Iraq - but Obama took it a step further and disregarded regional stability as a guiding factor for U.S. policy.

We don't have enough American troops inside of Iraq to destroy ISIL any time soon.

We're at war with the ISIS caliphate that sprang up because Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama precipitously withdrew all American forces from Iraq and created a vacuum of power, that ISIS was able to overrun vast territories that our soldiers had won in Operation Iraqi Freedom.

Military solution in Iraq has been disproven and discredited.

The problem with the war in Iraq is not so much the intelligence as the stupidity.

Johnny Apple, a New York Times correspondent, wrote a front-page story saying Afghanistan could be a quagmire and he was mocked and derided. What is certainly true is that all sorts of resources that would have been used in Afghanistan were diverted to Iraq. Would those resources have helped? Almost undoubtedly. Whether or not Afghanistan would be a peaceful nation-state had we not gone into Iraq I doubt. Afghanistan is going to be Afghanistan, no matter how hard we try to make it something else.

Look at the results of regime change in Iraq. You can't possibly claim that it was successful.

My military service is the thing I'm most proud of, but when I think of everything happening in the Middle East, I can't help but tell myself I wish we would have achieved some sort of lasting victory. No one touched that subject before Trump, especially not in the Republican Party.

We can stay in Afghanistan and the Middle East forever, and it won't make a difference.

Osama bin Laden is gone. The war in Iraq is over. Afghanistan is coming to a close.

I think the diplomatic-security needs in Iraq were an anomaly. There's never been a bulge of requirements that large ever before.

The liberation of Iraq is a crucial advance in the campaign against terror. We've removed an ally of al Qaeda.

Afghanistan would have been difficult enough without Iraq. Iraq made it impossible. The argument that had we just focused on Afghanistan we'd now be okay is persuasive, but it omits the fact that we weren't supposed to get involved in nation-building in Afghanistan.

I believe that President [George W.] Bush was correct. I thought that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, and I supported him steadfastly, and once we committed we should see it through.

The Bush administration has created an unimaginable catastrophe in Iraq. This should've been one of the easiest military occupations in history and they succeeded in turning it into one of the worst military disasters in history. They can't control it and it's almost impossible for them to get out for reasons you can't discuss in the United States because to discuss the reasons why they can't get out would be to concede the reasons why they invaded.

Any outside use of military power would at best furnish a temporary respite from the processes that we see playing out. We know that because we have been through all this before. The "surge" of several years ago was supposed to provide space and time for Iraqi political interests to work out their differences. 30,000 additional U.S. troops failed to lead to any working out of those differences, and the outcome is the mess we see today.

Would the Iraq War have occurred without WMD? I doubt it.

Let me say that no one has supported President Bush on Iraq more than I have.

Liberating Iraq would be a cakewalk.

People say the war in Iraq is a bad war, and the war in Afghanistan is a good war, but what's the difference between them? Democratic people around the world cannot accept that this is a good war. This is just endless war.

The idea that the United States is going to win the war in Iraq is just plain wrong.