Richard N. Haass Quotes

The United States of America, justifiably and proudly, went to war in Afghanistan in early winter of 2001. The United States invaded Iraq on a false premise in the spring of 2003.

The Second World War is and was constantly being drudged up by Blair and Bush to rationalize the invasion of Iraq.

Well, what I've said is that the war in Iraq will always be clouded by how it began, which was a wrong premise, that there were in fact no weapons of nuclear - weapons of mass destruction.

I would have voted 'no' on the Iraq war and 'yes' to Afghanistan.

The use of military force against Iraq and Afghanistan was and remains just.

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.

We did not go to war in Afghanistan or in Iraq to, quote, 'impose democracy.' We went to war in both places because we saw those regimes as a threat to the United States.

President Bush comes up with a reason a day as to why we are in Iraq.

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

Washington still refuses to provide evidence to support the claims in 1990 that a huge Iraqi military build-up on the Saudi border justified war.

The centerpiece of the Bush administration's case for going to war in Iraq was Secretary of State Colin Powell's presentation to the U.N. Security Council on February 5, 2003, six weeks before the invasion.

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.

Tony Blair took us to war in Iraq on the basis of the supposed threat of Saddam's weapons of mass destruction.

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.

On the justification for the war, it wasn't related to finding any particular weapon of mass destruction.

Iran, Libya and Syria are irresponsible states, which must be disarmed of weapons of mass destruction, and a successful American move in Iraq as a model will make that easier to achieve.

They have called Operation Iraqi Freedom a war of choice that isn't part of the real war on terror. Someone should tell that to al Qaeda.

For no good reason, George W. Bush and the best and brightest he could muster, including the likes of Paul Bremer and Paul Wolfowitz, decided it made sense to attack Iraq.

America responded to the 9-11 attacks by invading Iraq, only to discover that Saddam Hussein had palaces of mass luxury, not weapons of mass destruction.

…The invasion of Iraq was the worst foreign policy mistake in American history. We invaded a country that was no threat to us…. We have lost so much of our world prestige and world leadership.

The war of choice in Iraq could never have gained the congressional support it got without the psychological linkage between the shock of 9/11 and the postulated existence of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction.

The Iraq War was the first conflict in western history in which an imperialist war was massively protested against before it had even been launched.

I was very much in favor of the Iraq invasion.

We have concluded that the U.K. chose to join the invasion of Iraq before the peaceful options for disarmament had been exhausted. Military action at that time was not a last resort.