Iraq War Quotes

“Indifferent to truth, willing to use police-state tactics and vulgar libels against inconvenient witnesses, hopeless on health care, and flippant and fast and loose with national security: The case against Hillary Clinton for president is open-and-shut. Of course, against all these considerations you might prefer the newly fashionable and more media-weighty notion that if you don't show her enough appreciation, and after all she's done for us, she may cry.”
― Christopher Hitchens

“As he grew older, which was mostly in my absence, my firstborn son, Alexander, became ever more humorous and courageous. There came a time, as the confrontation with the enemies of our civilization became more acute, when he sent off various applications to enlist in the armed forces. I didn't want to be involved in this decision either way, especially since I was being regularly taunted for not having 'sent' any of my children to fight in the wars of resistance that I supported. (As if I could 'send' anybody, let alone a grown-up and tough and smart young man: what moral imbeciles the 'anti-war' people have become.)”
― Christopher Hitchens, Hitch 22: A Memoir

“During the Senate debate on the intervention in Iraq, Sen. Clinton made considerable use of her background and 'experience' to argue that, yes, Saddam Hussein was indeed a threat. She did not argue so much from the position adopted by the Bush administration as she emphasized the stand taken, by both her husband and Al Gore, when they were in office, to the effect that another and final confrontation with the Baathist regime was more or less inevitable. Now, it does not especially matter whether you agree or agreed with her about this (as I, for once, do and did). What does matter is that she has since altered her position and attempted, with her husband’s help, to make people forget that she ever held it. And this, on a grave matter of national honor and security, merely to influence her short-term standing in the Iowa caucuses. Surely that on its own should be sufficient to disqualify her from consideration?”
― Christopher Hitchens

“Yet isn't it all—all of it, every single episode and detail of the Clinton saga—exactly like that? And isn't some of it a little bit more serious? For Sen. Clinton, something is true if it validates the myth of her striving and her 'greatness' (her overweening ambition in other words) and only ceases to be true when it no longer serves that limitless purpose. And we are all supposed to applaud the skill and the bare-faced bravado with which this is done. In the New Hampshire primary in 1992, she knowingly lied about her husband's uncontainable sex life and put him eternally in her debt. This is now thought of, and referred to in print, purely as a smart move on her part. In the Iowa caucuses of 2008, he returns the favor by telling a huge lie about his own record on the war in Iraq, falsely asserting that he was opposed to the intervention from the very start. This is thought of, and referred to in print, as purely a tactical mistake on his part: trying too hard to help the spouse. The happy couple has now united on an equally mendacious account of what they thought about Iraq and when they thought it. What would it take to break this cheap little spell and make us wake up and inquire what on earth we are doing when we make the Clinton family drama—yet again—a central part of our own politics?”
― Christopher Hitchens

“The Hubble telescope swoops the other way. Halley’s Comet shoots back behind the trees as the Humvees roll, again, into Iraq.”
― Ocean Vuong, Time Is a Mother

“You might think that the Left could have a regime-change perspective of its own, based on solidarity with its comrades abroad. After all, Saddam's ruling Ba'ath Party consolidated its power by first destroying the Iraqi communist and labor movements, and then turning on the Kurds (whose cause, historically, has been one of the main priorities of the Left in the Middle East). When I first became a socialist, the imperative of international solidarity was the essential if not the defining thing, whether the cause was popular or risky or not. I haven't seen an anti-war meeting all this year at which you could even guess at the existence of the Iraqi and Kurdish opposition to Saddam, an opposition that was fighting for 'regime change' when both Republicans and Democrats were fawning over Baghdad as a profitable client and geopolitical ally. Not only does the 'peace' movement ignore the anti-Saddam civilian opposition, it sends missions to console the Ba'athists in their isolation, and speaks of the invader of Kuwait and Iran and the butcher of Kurdistan as if he were the victim and George W. Bush the aggressor.”
― Christopher Hitchens, Christopher Hitchens and His Critics: Terror, Iraq, and the Left

“Straw"

I still keep the last straw I picked

from the harvested wheat field near my home

before the war forced me out…

I have the straw framed

and take it with me everywhere I go…

And when asked about it, I tell people:

It is the straw that broke my back…


[Published on April 7, 2023 on CounterPunch.org]”
― Louis Yako

“It hadn't occurred to us that our country might go to war, and that if it did, we'd be the ones fighting it.”
― Karie Fugett, Alive Day: A Memoir

“At first, I hated the men who hurt him. I hoped that the other Marines were able to find and kill the bastards who did this. I wanted revenge. But as time passed, I found myself wondering what the men's names were. What they had had for breakfast that morning. Whether they had families. I wondered what it was exactly that made them want to do it. To kill. I wondered how many of their loved ones had been wounded or killed in the war. I thought about how much they must hate us, too.”
― Karie Fugett, Alive Day: A Memoir

“Young women wore colorful new dresses with high heels and false eyelashes. They clashed against the parking lot backdrop, dust whirling around them. There were babies too young to have ever met their fathers, parents holding each other in anticipation as they waited for their sons and daughters to arrive home from war. Cleve's unit--Third Battalion, Eighth Marines--had been gone seven months. Though everyone was excited to see those who'd survived, we also anticipated the sadness that would inevitably wash over us when the buses emptied too soon.”
― Karie Fugett, Alive Day: A Memoir

“Brittany was lonely. She'd had Dillon during Carson's first deployment, and when he returned, he didn't seem very interested in getting to know his son. Then, half a year later, he was gone again. The baby could walk now, and Brittany had gotten used to being a single mom. She would have to adjust her life to fit a husband into it again.”
― Karie Fugett, Alive Day: A Memoir

“you’ll have people hijacking the Palestinian struggle as a chance for bashing the Jews, like European neo-Nazis who demonstrate against the occupation of Palestinian territories or the Iraq War. It’s important for the left to keep them apart from the legitimate struggle for the rights of the Palestinians; however, saying that anti-Zionism is antisemitism is a well-known tactic of intellectual dishonesty.

(Interview in Forward)”
― Carlos Latuff

“What pushed you to be political?

I’ve always been interested in politics, but when I first got out of college I just wanted to have fun and do non-political work. What happened was the Bush vs Gore election and the Supreme Court [decision]. That was the event that really shocked me into starting to do political cartoons. It was just so outrageous at the time. Then 9/11 and the Iraq War. I prefer doing a mix of straightforward political cartoons and more cultural cartoons about trends and facial hair and things like that. Now I feel silly doing a strip about beards. Maybe things will calm down and I can go back to doing cartoons about facial hair. As time went on and politics became more and more dire, that’s what really sent me down that path. Also I started picking up more and more clients that are explicitly political, like dailykos and The Progressive Magazine and once in a while The Nation will run a cartoon. That pushed me in a more political direction as well.

(Interview with Comicsbeat)”
― Jen Sorensen

“What are your feelings from Bush to Obama?

Besides being responsible for the death of half a million people, I feel like Bush dealt a huge economic and social blow to the USA, one from which we may never fully recover. He directly flushed 3 trillion dollars down the toilet on hopeless, pointlessly destructive wars in Afghanistan and Iraq …and they’re not even over! For years to come, we’ll be paying costs for all the injured veterans (over 50,000) and destabilizing three countries, because you have to look at the impact that the Afghan war has on Pakistan. Bush expanded the use of torture, and created a whole new layer of government bureaucracy (the “Department of Homeland Security”) to spy on Americans. He created Indefinite Detention (at Guantanamo and other US military bases) and expanded the use of executive-ordered assassinations using the new drone technology. On economic issues, his administration allowed corporations to run things and regulate themselves. The agency that was supposed to regulate oil drilling had lobbyist-paid prostitutes sleeping with employees while oil industry lobbyists basically ran the agency. Energy companies like Enron, and the country’s investment banks were deregulated at the end of the Clinton administration and Bush allowed them to run wild. Above all, he was incompetent and appointed some really stupid people to important positions at every level of government.
Certainly, Obama has been involved in many of these same activities. A few he’s increased, such as the use of drone assassinations, but most of them he has at least tried to scale back. At the beginning of his first term, he tried to close the Guantanamo prison and have trials for many of the detainees in the United States but conservatives (including many Democrats) stirred up public resistance and blocked this from happening. He tried to get some kind of universal healthcare because over 50 million Americans don’t have health insurance. This is one of the leading causes of personal bankruptcies and foreclosures because someone gets sick in a family, loses their job, loses their health insurance (because American employers are source of most people’s healthcare) and they can’t pay their health bills or their mortgage. Or they use up all their money caring for a sick family member. So many people in the US wanted health insurance reform or single-payer, universal health care similar to what you have in the UK. Members of Obama’s own party (The Democrats) joined with Republicans to narrowly block “The public option” but they managed to pass a half-assed but not-unsubstantial reform of health insurance that would prevent insurers from denying you coverage when you’re sick or have a “preexisting condition.” The minute it was signed into law, Republicans sued in the courts (all the way to the supreme court) and fought, tooth and nail to block its implementation. Same thing with gun control, even as we’re one of the most violent industrial countries in the world. (Among industrial countries, our murder rate is second only to Russia). Obama has managed to withdraw troops from Iraq and Afghanistan over Republican opposition but, literally, everything he tries to do, they blast it in the media and fight it in Congress. So, while I have a lot of criticisms of Obama, he is many orders of magnitude less awful than Bush and many of the positive things he’s tried to do have been blocked.
That said, the Democratic and Republican parties agree on more things than they disagree. Both signed off on the Afghan and Iraq wars. Both signed off on deregulation of banks, of derivatives, of mortgage regulations and of the energy and telecom business …and we’ve been living with the consequences ever since. I’m guessing it’s the same thing with Labor and Conservatives in the UK. Labor or Democrats will SAY they stand for certain “progressive” things but they end up supporting the same old crap...

(2014 interview with iamhiphop)”
― Andy Singer

“The thing I like most about political cartooning is the relevance of the work to the real world. And if you do this long enough you get to look back and see yourself in historical context, sometimes on the right side and sometimes on the wrong. But I’m proud of the work I was doing in the runup that bamboozled us into the Iraq War and that horrible chapter where Cheney and Bush drove the country into the ditch, the one we’re still in.

(2010 interview with Washington City Paper)”
― Matt Wuerker

“When I was growing up, it was 'communists.' Now it's 'terrorists.' So you always have to have somebody that's our enemy to be afraid of, so the war machine can build more bombs, and guns, and bullets, and everything

(2005, Voices of a People's History of the US)”
― Cindy Sheehan

“I have yet to meet an Iraqi interpreter who can't rattle off the names of several slain colleagues. If George Bush or Barack Obama had been willing to exercise leadership, many of them would have been saved, but instead the bureaucracies under each president's control continue to regard these friends as potential enemies. They do this, they say, to protect us against terrorists, who hate us for our values.”
― Kirk W. Johnson, To Be a Friend Is Fatal: The Fight to Save the Iraqis America Left Behind

“[Hand Watches]
I opened the drawer
Where I keep old things and tokens
I glanced over some hand watches
With dead batteries and frozen times…
Watches that were gifted to me over time
By teachers or friends
To commend my accomplishments and respect for time…
It never occurred to them or to me then
That Time would die in a heart attack
And will cease to be important
The day my homeland was occupied and destroyed…
The day the occupying thieves
In collaboration with the thieves within
Would burn and destroy everything beautiful in it…
And since then, I refuse to wear hand watches
And will never wear one
Until my people get back their Time and dignity…
And when that happens, Time will remain unimportant
For then, I will turn into a butterfly
A sparrow
A daffodil or an orange blossom,
Or perhaps an apricot blossom on a branch
An unstoppable sprig of water
That flows beyond time and timing …
In that same drawer I found
Pens that have run out of ink
Looking like mummified corpses..
At a moment of despair,
A strong feeling struck me like a lightning
Leaving me with a frightening question:
What if this is a wound that all time can’t cure
A cause that all the ink of the world can’t solve?

[Original poem published in Arabic on February 5, 2023 at ahewar.org]”
― Louis Yako

“Iraq is destroyed
a nation became a broken item bought
a sectarian land, a money suck
a place where soldiers die
a mistake, anything but Iraq”
― Remi Kanazi, Before the Next Bomb Drops: Rising Up from Brooklyn to Palestine

“I'm the only justice there is in this country.”
― Ahmed Saadawi, Frankenstein in Baghdad

“Politics is when you say you are going to do one thing while intending to do another. Then you do neither what you said nor what you intended.”
― Saddam Hussein

“[...] In a country where values are collapsing, patriotism becomes the handmaiden to totalitarianism. The country becomes the religion. We are asked to live in a state of religious fervor: Love America! Love it because America has become a substitute for religion. But to love your country indiscriminately means that critical distinctions begin to go. And democracy depends upon these distinctions.

A good Englishman has a certain sense of the complexity of his national life. Even if he rides to hounds. The British have memory in a way we don't. That is the scariest single thing about American democracy to me: We don't have roots the way other countries do. Relatively, we are without deep traditions. So the transition from democracy to totalitarianism could happen quickly.”
― Norman Mailer, Why are We at War?

“When McSweeney presented Starmer with his slides describing the composition of the party, he identified 5 percent of the membership as unreconstructed Blairites: the types to defend the Iraq War and the legacy of Blairite neoliberalism. This was, most likely, the same rough 4.5 percent who had voted for arch-Blairite Liz Kendall in the 2015 leadership campaign that McSweeney had directed.

What many failed to realise at the time was that the Labour Together Project, and the Starmer Project that would succeeed it, reprented just this marginal 5 percent of the party. If the Labour Together Project operated in secret and crafted a misleading leadership pitch that was unceremoniously dumped upon victory, this modus operandi arguably reflected a clear-eyed understanding that this faction's beliefs, ideologies and political language were deepy unpopular with the Labour members it needed to win over. Implementing this deceptive strategy required a candidate like Starmer; a man who felt no compunction about posturing as a radical during the campaign and then dropping the act once in power.”
― Paul Holden, The Fraud: Keir Starmer, Morgan McSweeney, and the Crisis of British Democracy

“Blackwater's style fit in perfectly with Bremer's mission in Iraq. In fact, one could argue that that Bremer didn't just get protection from Blackwater's highly trained mercenaries but also from the all-powerful realities of the free-market lab he was running in Iraq. Indeed, it seems that those forces were what Bremer banked on to survive the Iraq job—if he died, Blackwater's reputation would be shot.”
― Jeremy Scahill, Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army

“Meanwhile, the prospect of tremendous profits depleted official national forces, as soldiers sought more lucrative posts with private companies, which also aggressively headhunted Special Forces men for private work in Iraq.”
― Jeremy Scahill

“During his year in Iraq, Paul Bremer presided over various U.S. policies that greatly accelerated the emergence of multiple antioccupation resistance movements. In April 2004, it all came to a head.”
― Jeremy Scahill, Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army

“I have heard the Republican Party is the party of greed. When they are exposed to truth it is difficult to deny this. Some believe George W. Bush was giving freedom and democracy to the Iraqi people. But, it has always been about oil. They struggle and get angry when confronted with a different opinion. The wars have cost many lives of women, children, and elders. In the last few weeks we have even seen killings for sport in Afghanistan. No one is crying about this issue, yet we have people believing the Gospel of Fox News.”
― Leon Blunt Horn Matthews, Rez Ramblings: Living on the Pine Ridge as 21st Century as an "Injun"

“When I think about the colonization movements today, I think of Iraq. The United States and its allies are offering freedom and democracy as the new colonial tools in an effort to gain resources and money. We as Americans are addicted to oil and will do everything in our power to keep our prices to control price and access to oil. Iraq is being colonized.”
― Leon Blunt Horn Matthews, Rez Ramblings: Living on the Pine Ridge as 21st Century as an "Injun"

“If one stepped back from the various substories playing out on the ground in Iraq in 2005, the big-picture reality was that the country was quickly becoming the global epicenter of privatized warfare with scores of heavily armed groups of various loyalties and agendas roaming Iraq.”
― Jeremy Scahill, Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army

“Salmond made a tactical retreat from SNP leadership in 2000. His pre-eminent hatred of war ultimately brought him back after Blair's instant dive into the Iraq whirlpool (while demanding Holyrood Labour subservience to himself). Salmond's resourcefulness in government, his enlargement of its international profile and transmission of joy in Scotland's quest for its seat in the United Nations, carried him far beyond predictions as he took independence all previous heights in Referendum 2014. But however much he was caricatured as 'Smart Alex', he was more deeply self-critical than Parnell, and was unwise to resign premiership and leadership after the referendum's defeat. His encouragement of his juniors generously attributed greater fidelity and integrity than his SNP successors proved to possess.”
― Owen Dudley Edwards, iScot 100, November/December 2024