Violence... The story so far

Patriotism is supporting your country all the time and your government when it deserves it. Mark Twain

"It is somewhat puzzling, I think, that you can have 100% certainty about the [WMD's] existence and zero certainty about where they are."
Hans Blix

"We found the weapons of mass destruction. Uh, you know, we found biological laboratories."
George W Bush

"Uh, I'm not sure exactly what that means."
George W Bush

"And we believe he has, in fact, reconstituted nuclear weapons."
Dick Cheney

"We are determined to take this apart. We have a tremendous group of dedicated American men and women involved in this, the best assets of the intelligence community can provide."
David Kay

"And unlike pre-war intelligence we don't require someone just to say something, we actually need the physical evidence."
David Kay

"…one of the first things that worried me was we had a big army running through Iraq in March and April. WMD was not used against them. Uh, nor was it found; that's sort of remarkable if they had large stockpiles."
David Kay

"Around the weapons programs, if a weapons program exists, you are going to find people, people engaged in the production, the technology, engineering and design. People involved in protecting the weapons, people prepared in moving them, and people involved in preparing to use the weapons. We found none of that."
David Kay

"Secret societies have their own rules. Secret societies generally don't feel an obligation to openly and democratically communicate."
David Kay

"I felt that in my last year in the Pentagon, I felt that there was a great deal of contempt for the constraint on the government that our constitution lays out. And, I also felt that there was a contempt for the constitution…"
Karen Kwiatkowski


"…Rumsfeld said there aren’t any good targets in Afghanistan. And there are lots of good targets in Iraq."
Richard Clark

"They wanted to believe that there was a connection but the CIA was sitting there, the FBI was sitting there, I was sitting there saying: 'We've looked at this issue for years, there's just no connection.'"
Richard Clark

"Osama bin Ladin had been saying for years, America wants to invade an Arab country and occupy it, an oil-rich Arab country. He'd been saying this; this is part of his propaganda. So what do we do after 9/11? We invade an oil-rich Arab country which was doing nothing to threaten us."
Richard Clark

"We know for a fact there are weapons there."
Ari Fleisher

"Everybody knows that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction."
Colin Powell

"It simply makes no sense to wait any longer"
Condoleezza Rice

"Maybe someone knew down in the bowels of the Agency, but no one in our circles knew that there were doubts and suspicions that this might be a forgery."
Condoleezza Rice

"There are a lot of people who lie and get away with it and that's just a fact."
Donald Rumsfeld

"His regime has an active program to acquire and develop nuclear weapons and let there be no doubt about it."
Donald Rumsfeld

"We know where they are, they're in the area around Tikrit and Baghdad and east, west, south and north somewhat."
Donald Rumsfeld

"I don't know anybody that I can think of that has contended that the Iraqis had nuclear weapons."
Donald Rumsfeld


"Who was it that asked for this review of the Niger nuclear material question? It was the Vice President."
Senator Bob Graham

"When you talk about a mushroom cloud how much more imminent threat could there be?"
Senator Ted Kennedy


"How many things apparently impossible have nevertheless been performed by resolute men who had no alternative but death."
Napoleon Bonaparte

"There are only two forces in the world, the sword and the spirit. In the long run the sword will always be conquered by the spirit."
Napoleon Bonaparte

"In war, moral factors acount for three quarters of the whole; relative material strength accounts for only one quarter."
Napoleon Bonaparte

"Never, never, never believe any war will be smooth and easy, or that anyone who embarks on the strange voyage can measure the tides and hurricanes he will encounter. The statesman who yields to war fever must realize that once the signal is given, he is no longer the master of policy but the slave of unforeseeable and uncontrollable events."
Winston Churchill

"...Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country."
Herman Goering

[And it still works in 21st century America!]

"Why, of course, the people don't want war, Why would some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best that he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece. Naturally, the common people don't want war; neither in Russia nor in England nor in America, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. But, after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy or a fascist dictatorship or a Parliament or a Communist dictatorship."
Herman Goering [as related to Gustave Gilbert at the Nuremberg trials, from the book Nuremberg Diary.]

"Wars teach us not to love our enemies but to hate our allies."
W. L. George

"It is well that war is so terrible, or we should grow too fond of it. "
Robert E. Lee

"You can no more win a war than you can win an earthquake"
Jeannette Rankin

"... I also take the courage, as an absolute[ly] neutral person, to admit that I am not quite convinced that the claim that one state can oblige the other to tolerate an international control commission on its territory is juridically motivated. This right can only exist after the states agree on disarmament. Then a new situation will have been established, which will put an end to the cold war and which will give each state the right to know, through international inspection on each other's territory, that each country meets its obligations to disarm according to the agreement. The same international control will see to it that no tests can be carried out

"An urgent necessity for the world is that the atomic powers agree as soon as possible on disarmament under effective international control. The possibility of such disarmament negotiations should not be made questionable by not absolute[ly] necessary appeals for international verification of the discontinuance of testing.

"Only when the states agree not to carry out tests anymore can promising negotiations about disarmament and world peace take place. When also this time this cannot be achieved, then the world is in a hopeless and very dangerous state. ..."
[Albert Schweitzer: excerpt of a letter to President John Kennedy, 20 April 1962]

"There are few die well that die in battle."
William Shakespeare (Henry V 4.1.141)

"I am tired and sick of war. Its glory is all moonshine. It is only those who have neither fired a shot nor heard the shrieks and groans of the wounded who cry aloud for blood, for vengeance, for desolation. War is hell."
General William Tecumseh Sherman

"In all history, there is no instance of a country having benefited from prolonged warfare."
General SunTzu - circa 500 BCE? [Some question his literal authenticity.]

"It is the business of a general to be quiet and thus ensure secrecy, upright and just, and thus ensure order." ."].
General SunTzu - circa 500 BCE -- [Some writers today might say: "I told you so."

"One may know how to conquer without being able to do it."
General SunTzu - circa 500 BCE?

"In all fighting, the direct method may only be used for joining battle, but indirect methods will be needed in order to secure vistory."
General SunTzu - circa 500 BCE


In memory of:
Robert M Christian. Lt., USMC
[From a letter to Bob's sister.]

"There is no patriotism in this war. All we're doing is trying to protect each other and stay alive. Men like Lieutenant Bob come along once in a million years. We both knew that our survival depended upon two things: the ability of our men and politics. Bob made his men the best. He did his part. We all are. We are waiting for that other half...

"All we can do, as the Marines say, is remember and continue to march. I am proud to say that once in my lifetime, I had a brother."
Larry Kline. Lt., USMC

[Some things never change.]


"The administration showed photos of nuclear or former nuclear weapons sites in Iraq, pre-1991 nuclear weapons sites, claimed the new construction showed that they were ongoing nuclear weapons sites, complete nonsense."
David Albright

"Everyone in Washington was believing them. And I thought people had really, somehow checked out of reality in order to go to war. That it was a war fever that had taken over."
David Albright

"The Bush Administration officials either routinely said or tried to give the impression that if Iraq had not fully accounted for all of a certain item related to chemical or biological weapons, then it must be there. And that’s not at all what the inspectors said or found."
David Albright

"I saw it as a deliberate attempt to take information, selectively take information, and try to basically say that Iraq poses an imminent nuclear threat and therefore action is absolutely necessary and I felt that was absolutely wrong."
David Albright

"The administration showed photos of nuclear or former nuclear weapons sites in Iraq, pre-1991 nuclear weapons sites, claimed the new construction showed that they were ongoing nuclear weapons sites, complete nonsense."
David Albright

"I think there was on the part of the media too much of getting into the upcoming of the war and not enough look at: 'Do we need to go to war?'"
David Albright

"The excitement was to make the case to go to war and that was the controversy the media loved. You know, it was the titillation of a WMD hitting us, not the titillation of conflict of attacking the administration."
David Albright

"It was a prosecutor making a case, using what benefited his case, ignoring evidence that would undermine his case, and there was no defense attorney to give us the other side."
David Albright

"I was chief of collecting information on Iraq through the mid-nineties. I know what we had, and what we didn’t have, and I’m here to tell you there was no information."
Robert Baer

"So you had this circular reporting and you had the New York Times admitting that it was using one source for all of its information about weapons of mass destruction."
Robert Baer

"And on a lot of these stories the journalists didn’t want to look into it because the editors told them to run with it, we’re going to be supportive of the administration, it’s the patriotic thing to do."
Robert Baer

"It was a state that was on the verge of failure, now it is a failed state. Failed states cause terrorism…"
Robert Baer

"We all know that the documentation on yellow-cake from Niger was faked, but why doesn't anybody say who did it? Who faked the document…"
Milt Bearden

"The question remains, who did the document? Who forged the document? And why?"
Milt Bearden

"It is fair to say that the Iraq war was a diversion from the war on terrorism."
Rand Beers

"Distorted beliefs, estimates and guesstimates that it appears he was misleading the public and the Congress."
John Dean

"So it was a very vengeful act against the ambassador to try to hurt him by hurting his wife's career if not wishing her physical damage. I've never seen a dirty trick that could be a hit."
John Dean

"The inspection regime worked. It was the most intrusive inspection regime in history and it worked. And at the end of the day that’s another reason we went to war for nothing."
Patrick Eddington

"We've created more terrorists in Iraq and we haven't even solved the problem of Afghanistan."
Expert VO

"In some respects, it's as if Vietnam didn't even happen."
Expert VO

"We've violated, I think, fundamental principles that have guided this country's foreign policy so successfully since 1947."
Expert VO

"I don't think it is an accident at all that so much of the justification turned out to be fallacious, misleading, deliberately so."
Charles Freeman

"Well the war really had absolutely nothing to do with terrorism, there was no connection whatsoever between Iraq and the secular regime there and the religious fanatics who perpetrated 9/11."
Charles Freeman

"Ironically the major effect of the invasion of Iraq, in terms of weapons of mass destruction, has been to show that the inspectors were right all along."
Charles Freeman

"The only real connection is that having invaded Iraq we are likely to make it a focus of terrorism. We are likely to produce what the president has said Iraq represents, mainly the central battlefield in the war on terrorism. Why? Because we’ve sent a lot of Americans into a place where they’re sitting ducks for people who think the only good
American is a dead one."
Charles Freeman

"Well I don't think it's patriotic to stand by and remain silent while your country stumbles into disaster."
Charles Freeman

"Iraq, and we have very good intelligence on this, was not part of the picture of terrorism before we invaded."
Mel Goodman

"It was clear that Iraq did not have a nuclear weapons program."
Mel Goodman

"It was phony evidence, it was based on intelligence we had from Iraqi exiles who wanted this country to attack Iraq so these people could then take over in Baghdad and establish their own regime. "
Mel Goodman

"Patriotism is the last refuge of scoundrels and I think these are scoundrels. They have no argument now, they have no defense for what they did. The country is in a terrible international security situation that I think is perilous. So they’re attacking the patriotism of others."
Mel Goodman -- Former State Dept., Counter Terrorism

"Like it or not, Westerners from Herodotus time to the present age carry historical weight far out of proportion to their numbers, and so create waves where there should only be tiny ripples. In the decade of the 1990s alone there were literally millions of innocent Africans butchered in Rwanda, the Congo, Somalia, Mozambique, more killed in a single month than all of those lost on the West Bank or in Israel proper in the last half century - but for a variety of perverse reasons those dead carried little moral capital with the arbiters of the world's attention and memory." Victor David Hanson, Ripples of Battle.

"The media is supposed to be the Fourth Estate but they decided to completely climb into bed with the administration on this."
Larry Johnson

"I'm one of the ones who drank the Kool-Aid. But early on I felt there was some dangers going into the war and I tried to get an Op-Ed into the various major newspapers and the word that kept coming back was: “ nobody wants to hear this because we're going to war."
Larry Johnson

"They were not given the opportunity to speak because no one wanted to hear what they said."
John Brady Keisling

"Every checkable piece of that intelligence that has come to public notice has proven to be false or at least self-serving in the extreme."
John Brady Keisling

"For me, America is this amazing land of opportunity, of beauty, of idealism, of hope. It is a beacon to the world. It’s a place of fantastic people and what infuriates me more than anything else is that this administration has systematically slandered, libeled, blackened the image of America to our friends and allies around the world."
John Brady Keisling

"The evidence was simply not there."
Ray McGovern

"When the emperor has no clothes, you have to have the presence of mind and
the courage to stand up and say, 'The emperor has no clothes'."
Ray McGovern (27 year CIA analyst)

"It was a bizarre warping of the intelligence process and they thought they were going to get away with it because who was going to see the classified version?"
Ray McGovern

"The ties with Al Qaeda was just a scare tactic to exploit the trauma, the very real trauma, that the American people have felt ever since 9/11 and to associate that trauma with Iraq. As you know from the polls, most Americans believed that Iraq had something to do with 9/11 and that was a very successful and very deliberate and very unethical and immoral operation on the part of the P.R. people of this administration."
Ray McGovern

"If there's no weapons of mass destruction, which there aren’t. If there’s no tie to Al-Qaeda, which there’s not, maybe now there are. Then why did we go to war."
Ray McGovern

"George Tenet's analysts had spent a year and a half of torturous investigation, torturous analysis, to see if there were ties between Al Qaeda and Iraq. They found none."
Ray McGovern

"It was a masterful performance, but none of it was true. Where are all these weapons? Where is all this VX? Where is all the anthrax?"
Ray McGovern

"There were never any chemical weapons in that facility, I’m intimately familiar with that facility. I’ve inspected it a number of times…"
Scott Ritter

"The UN weapons inspectors knew that the truck shown by Colin Powell in those photographs were fire trucks, not decontamination trucks."
Scott Ritter

"These mobile labs have now been shown to be nothing more than hydrogen generation facilities."
Scott Ritter

"When you take a look at the mobile labs that Colin Powell discussed, he didn't put up photographs of these facilities; he put up artist's renditions of these facilities. Why? Because we have no proof they exist."
Scott Ritter

"The media is culpable for the misleading of the American public. They bought into the Bush Administrations rhetoric."
Scott Ritter

"I don't believe the mainstream media acted responsibly in regards to Iraq. You know, I was belittled, I was called a traitor, I was called crazy. Paula Zahn of CNN accused me of drinking Saddam Hussein's Kool-Aid for making accurate statements in response to aluminum tubes."
Scott Ritter

"…a couple of senior administration officials leaked to Bob Novak that my wife was a CIA operative involved in the weapons of mass destruction business at the CIA."
Joe Wilson

"What you're doing when you expose a CIA officer, of any name, you're basically taking their entire career and flushing it down the toilet."
Joe Wilson

"A president of the United States and an administration that has come to office on a platform of restoring dignity and honor to the White House, what they did was neither dignified nor was it terribly honorable, nor was it germane to the issue at hand."
Joe Wilson

"We owe our soldiers, our sailors, our airmen and our marines, nothing less before we send them to battle."
Joe Wilson

"Well, if you made it 12 years ago and it had a shelf life of two months, it may not be safe to drink, but it isn’t sarin nerve gas any longer. And there’s no way the agency could not have known that."
Peter Zimmerman