“The terrorists regard Iraq as the central front in their war against humanity. . .If they’re not stopped, the terrorists will be able to advance their agenda to develop weapons of mass destruction, to destroy Israel, to intimidate Europe, and to break our will and blackmail our government into isolation. I’m going to make you this commitment: this is not going to happen on my watch.”
George W. Bush, Osan Air Force base, South Korea, November 19, 2005
"If the United States can foster the development of a sufficiently stable
political system in Iraq, and if it can help train, equip, and support military
and police forces to defend that system, then American policy has a chance of
succeeding. The United States can pull its own troops out of Iraq, knowing that
it has left something sustainable behind. But if neither of those goals is
realistic - if Iraqi politics remains chaotic and the Iraqi military remains
overwhelmed by the insurgent threat - then the American strategy as a whole is
doomed." "WHY IRAQ HAS NO ARMY", James Fallows, Atlantic, Vol. 296, Issue 5, December 2005
"The war has already cost the United States an estimated $251 billion. Each day an estimated $195 million is being spent--money that could provide twelve meals to every starving child in the world, according to Senator Ted Kennedy's office."
"The Iraq Index", John S. Friedman, The Nation, 12-19-05
"The American air war inside Iraq today is perhaps the most significant—and underreported—aspect of the fight against the insurgency. The military authorities in Baghdad and Washington do not provide the press with a daily accounting of missions that Air Force, Navy, and Marine units fly or of the tonnage they drop, as was routinely done during the Vietnam War. One insight into the scope of the bombing in Iraq was supplied by the Marine Corps during the height of the siege of Falluja in the fall of 2004. “With a massive Marine air and ground offensive under way,” a Marine press release said, “Marine close air support continues to put high-tech steel on target. . . . Flying missions day and night for weeks, the fixed wing aircraft of the 3rd Marine Aircraft Wing are ensuring battlefield success on the front line.” Since the beginning of the war, the press release said, the 3rd Marine Aircraft Wing alone had dropped more than five hundred thousand tons of ordnance. “This number is likely to be much higher by the end of operations,” Major Mike Sexton said. In the battle for the city, more than seven hundred Americans were killed or wounded; U.S. officials did not release estimates of civilian dead, but press reports at the time told of women and children killed in the bombardments."
"On the current course we will have two options," I was told by a Marine
lieutenant colonel who had recently served in Iraq and who prefers to remain
anonymous. "We can lose in Iraq and destroy our army, or we can just lose."
"The officer went on to say that of course neither option was acceptable, which
is why he thought it so urgent to change course. By "destroy our army" he meant
that it would take years for the U.S. military to recover from the strain on
manpower, equipment, and - most of all - morale that staying in Iraq would put
on it. (Retired Army General Barry McCaffrey had this danger in mind when he
told Time magazine last winter that "the Army's wheels are going to come off in
the next twenty-four months" if it remained in Iraq.) "Losing" in Iraq would
mean failing to overcome the violent insurgency. A continuing insurgency would,
in the view of the officer I spoke with, sooner or later mean the country's
fracture in a bloody civil war. That, in turn, would mean the emergence of a
central "Sunni-stan" more actively hostile to the United States than Saddam
Hussein's Iraq ever was, which could in the next decade be what the Taliban of
Afghanistan was in the 1990s: a haven for al-Qaeda and related terrorists. "In
Vietnam we just lost," the officer said. "This would be losing with
consequences."
"UP IN THE AIR: Where is the war in Iraq headed next?", Seymour Hersh, The New Yorker, 11-28-2005
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