Colin Powell Quotes

What I want to know is why in the world the Democratic party leadership is supporting the president's unilateral attack on Iraq?

They have been saying for a long time that Iraq made an effort to import active uranium, and my colleague demonstrated the other day that they came to the conclusion that it was a fake document that everybody is relying upon.

I believe that sooner or later we're going to have to deal with Saddam Hussein, because of his general reputation, because of what I'm convinced he's done with regard to terrorism and the support thereof. But I'm not at all sure I believe that it has to be right now.

Dr. Rice's record on Iraq gives me great concern. In her public statements she clearly overstated and exaggerated the intelligence concerning Iraq before the war in order to support the President's decision to initiate military action against Iraq.

Unless the president can make a very compelling case that Saddam Hussein has his finger on a weapon of mass destruction and is about ready to use it, I do not think that now is the time to go to war against Saddam Hussein.

If one single chemical warhead falls on Israel, we’ll hit Iraq with everything we have got.... look at your watch and forty minutes later an Iraqi city will be reduced to ashes.

I found it peculiar that those who wanted to take military action could — with 100 per cent certainty — know that the weapons existed and turn out to have zero knowledge of where they were.

By God, we will make the fire eat up half of Isreal if it tries to do anything against Iraq.

I will begin to remove our troops from Iraq immediately.

Heavy as they are, the costs of action must be weighed against the price of inaction. If Saddam defies the world and we fail to respond, we will face a far greater threat in the future. Saddam will strike again at his neighbors; he will make war on his own people. And mark my words, he will develop weapons of mass destruction. He will deploy them, and he will use them.

It's just a matter of time before we go into Iraq and get Saddam Hussein. I think just before Bush falls below 50 percent, that's when we'll be going.

The question becomes what kind of coalition can we build that will make a transition and empower the people of Iraq? The American soldiers' presence there is an act of provocation. There's a big red ball on the back of every American soldier in that country, so our being there contributes to the crisis, it does not resolve the crisis.

We promise that the events of 1991 will not happen again. We have pledged to remove Saddam. And we will deliver.

No matter how tough Iraq became, removing Saddam Hussein was the right thing to do for the sake of peace and for the 25 million people we liberated.

The claims made about Iraq's WMD capabilities before the invasion were inaccurate, wrong, and in some cases, deliberately misleading.

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

In America, every time we take rebels, whether it's in Iraq or anywhere else, we're arming people. And you know what happens? They end up being worse than the people.

We cleared many of their towns and cities and rural areas of al-Qaida Iraq and other insurgents.

Speaker John Boehner complained that Barack Obama ordered the U.S. military into combat in Libya without clearly defining the mission to the American people and Congress. See, apparently, you're only allowed to do that when invading Iraq.

Iraq is a very important part of securing the homeland, and its a very important part of helping change the Middle East into a part of the world that will not serve as a threat to the civilized world, to people like - or to the developed world, to people like - in the United States.

I voted to threaten the use of force to make Saddam Hussein comply with the resolutions of the United Nations.

I look at what the president [Barack Obama] it doing, it adds up to me. We just have to keep - try to get more support for those people on the ground in Syria and Iraq who have to actually physically take the territory back.

We assume that all statements must be mild inversions of the truth, because it's too weird to imagine people who aren't casually lying, pretty much all the time.

In Iraq, the U.S. military's whack-a-mole approach to killing Saddam Hussein may have finally paid off. The bombs destroyed the area and left behind a 60-foot crater, or as coalition forces prefer to call it: a freedom hole.

Saddam Hussein had nerve gas and used it against his own people, he had used chemical weapons against the Iranians and he almost had a nuclear bomb in 1981 and in 1991. And he had been caught with anthrax in 1995 by the UN inspections after denying that he had it.