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Iraq War Quotes

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Iraq War Quotes

“It’s good and just that you practice on teachers and school principals, because one day you are going to have to live in a world of lawmakers and tax collectors, and you should have some sense of how to use your freedom of speech to claim control over your life.”

EducationEducational PhilosophyIraq WarHomeschoolingUnschoolingHomeschoolSelf Directed LearningAlternative EducationOperation Iraqi FreedomIraq Veteran
Book:A White Rose: A Soldier's Story of Love, War, and School
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“We smashed their schools, burned them, and shot people based on the time of night they were outside. They dressed up like our allies and blew themselves up, when they weren’t murdering the families of our actual allies and throwing their headless bodies into the Tigris. Write a five paragraph essay on that. Make sure each paragraph has a topic sentence.”

EducationEducational PhilosophyIraq WarHomeschoolingUnschoolingHomeschoolSelf Directed LearningAlternative EducationOperation Iraqi FreedomIraq Veteran
Book:A White Rose: A Soldier's Story of Love, War, and School
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“Being lawful and following the rules means allowing their reality to become your reality, and their reality includes you pledging your allegiance to their republic before you’re old enough know what the words “allegiance” or “republic” mean.”

EducationEducational PhilosophyIraq WarHomeschoolingUnschoolingHomeschoolSelf Directed LearningAlternative EducationOperation Iraqi FreedomIraq Veteran
Book:A White Rose: A Soldier's Story of Love, War, and School
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“This guy tried to kill me, he’s out there, and I’m going to blow his f***ng head off.' Nothing happened for a few weeks, then we went to Kuwait, then we went home to New York, and I was in a bunch of undergraduate English classes within thirty days of landing at Fort Drum.”

EducationEducational PhilosophyIraq WarHomeschoolingUnschoolingHomeschoolSelf Directed LearningAlternative EducationOperation Iraqi FreedomIraq Veteran
Book:A White Rose: A Soldier's Story of Love, War, and School
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“You would think that after fifteen years of war on terror, waged by a country with nuclear submarines, all terror on earth would be destroyed. I’m shocked that nary a nightmare has made it out alive. Yet somehow, killing the shit out of people – thousands and thousands of people – doesn’t make the living not scared. What you do wind up with are millions of refugees and armies of genocidal fanatics.”

EducationEducational PhilosophyIraq WarHomeschoolingUnschoolingHomeschoolSelf Directed LearningAlternative EducationOperation Iraqi FreedomIraq Veteran
Book:A White Rose: A Soldier's Story of Love, War, and School
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“Compulsion – nonconsensual education – requires violence; it requires complete control over what students put into their brain, the people they are exposed to, the places they are authorized to be, and oftentimes, with free lunch programs, what food goes into their body. Compulsory systems are resentful of families who do not enforce homework or dress code policies; are reluctant to allow parents into its buildings except once or twice a year on special “open house” days; and fear parents who choose to homeschool.”

EducationEducational PhilosophyIraq WarHomeschoolingUnschoolingHomeschoolSelf Directed LearningAlternative EducationOperation Iraqi FreedomIraq Veteran
Book:A White Rose: A Soldier's Story of Love, War, and School
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“School vision statements often read something like, “We believe all kids can learn” or “life-long learners” or something silly like that. What an absurd thing to put in writing! “We, at Grassy Hill Elementary, believe all Kindergarteners can get taller” or “We, the Prospect Junior High cafeteria staff, believe that all kids can and will eat food.”

EducationEducational PhilosophyIraq WarHomeschoolingUnschoolingHomeschoolSelf Directed LearningAlternative EducationOperation Iraqi FreedomIraq Veteran
Book:A White Rose: A Soldier's Story of Love, War, and School
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“Our freedom of speech is not some cute, optional, anachronistic thing that you write about on a short answer quiz about school uniforms or some such silliness. Your freedom to assemble (e.g., Junto), to create and distribute content, and to express yourself (e.g., to ask a Klan member Why do you hate me when you don’t know me?), and to be able to do so without fear of violence or censorship (which are essentially the same thing), is absolutely fundamental to a free and just society.”

EducationEducational PhilosophyIraq WarHomeschoolingUnschoolingHomeschoolSelf Directed LearningAlternative EducationOperation Iraqi FreedomIraq Veteran
Book:A White Rose: A Soldier's Story of Love, War, and School
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“People deserve to know about that. They need to understand, not so that they can pity the region, but simply because it helps to explain so much of the way Kurdistan has tried to improve itself afterwards. They need to understand to stop it from ever happening again. They need to understand, because it is unacceptable that a genocide that was essentially ignored by many countries around the world at the time should be continued to be ignored by history”

LawHumanityInternationalGenocideIraq WarKurdishKurdistanIraqi KurdistanAnfal Genocide
Book:Kurdistan: Genocide and Rebirth
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“In our towns and cities they will continue to be born, in our communities they will go on to be nurtured & radicalised & from within our neighbourhoods they will terrorise & murder our citizens including women & children in their attempt to destroy the very fabric & order of our civilised society. They are influenced by our ignorance, our lack of knowledge is their power, martyrdom in the name of their God and prophet is their aspiration & so it is critical that we waste no time & learn more about them & this ideology they follow before we can even begin to eradicate this chilling & growing endemic Islamic faith based terrorism’.”

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Author:Cal Sarwar
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“On January 17, 1991 and for the 43 days that followed, I watched CNN’s live coverage of SCUD missiles and bombs fall over Baghdad like rain; then the 12 ½ years of unjust sanctions that killed approximately a million Iraqis, half of which were children under the age of five; then an unjust attack in 2003 that opened the borders to terrorists from all over the world and reduced the cradle of civilization to piles of rubble. The gov. asked us to support their plan or else be considered anti-American and undemocratic and they ask of us the same today, 25 years later, even though history proved they were pro-profit not pro-life.”

PoliticsDemocracyCapitalismSanctionsIraq War2003 Us Invasion
Book:The Great American Family
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“Rather than considering the Iraqi regime solely responsible for these sanctions, many exiled and displaced academics believe that the UN bears the main ethical and human responsibility for the damage the embargo caused for Iraqi people and society. Many academics saw these sanctions as the UN’s method to obtain the consent of Iraqi people to the 2003 occupation through starving and weakening the people, as well as destroying Iraq’s strong institutions and infrastructure.”

WarViolenceMiddle EastColonialismImperialismSanctionsIraq WarDecolonizationEmbargo
Book:Bullets in Envelopes: Iraqi Academics in Exile
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“Mohammed started telling me about some of the most horrific stories he encountered in Mosul during the ISIL years, including when he worked at a local NGO as a caseworker. ‘How can you not be traumatized and suffer sleepless nights when dealing with a story of a 13-year old boy who was escaping for safety with his parents and sister from the right to the left side of Mosul, while it was being liberated by the Iraqi army?’ Mohammed paused, lit a cigarette, rolled down the car window, and continued, ‘as they were running, the father wanted to make sure the road was clear, so as soon as he ventured out, he got a bullet in his head from a sniper. The mother ran to him crying and screaming. She, too, got a bullet in her head. As the little boy and his sister tried to escape, the girl was shot, but she didn’t die. After hiding in a nearby building for a while, they came out and took their parents’ bodies to bury them in that same empty building they took as a shelter. Once done, as they were leaving, the little girl got yet another bullet and died this time. The 13-year old boy survived, but did he really survive? Can even a person who hears this story survive it?”

WarViolenceMiddle EastIraq WarColonizationWar CrimesWar StoriesUs Foreign Policy
Author:Louis Yako
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“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)”

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Author:Matt Wuerker
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“«Cuando Estados Unidos, Gran Bretaña y sus aliados invadieron Iraq en 2003 dieron comienzo a una revolución. No era esa su intención, pues su objetivo era acabar con Sadam Hussein y su régimen, y no se apercibieron de la radicalidad de lo que estaban haciendo. La invasión y ocupación del país suponía un cambio revolucionario porque ponía fin a la dominación suní, vigente sin solución de continuidad durante cientos de años bajo los otomanos, los británicos y tras la independencia. Los americanos disolvieron el Ejército y los cuerpos de seguridad, que habían sido los principales instrumentos de control suní sobre el 80 por ciento de la población, que era chií o kurda. (...) Las potencias invasoras nunca asumieron el hecho de que la identificación del nuevo gobierno post-Sadam con los americanos y con un antiguo poder imperial como Gran Bretaña lo deslegitimaba desde el primer momento a ojos de los iraquíes».”

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Book:The Age of Jihad: Islamic State and the Great War for the Middle East
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“You are going to war! It is no longer a question of if you are going to go, but a question of when. Look around! In a few years, or even a few months, several of you will be dead. Some of you will be severely wounded or so badly mutilated that your own mother can’t stand the sight of you. And for the real unlucky ones, you will come home so emotionally disfigured that you wish you had died over there.”

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Book:Mass Casualties: A Young Medic's True Story of Death, Deception, and Dishonor in Iraq
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“Lost In black as solid as a mire In a land no one would die for In a time I was lost To anyone who ever loved me The world set itself on fire And the sky collapsed above me In a place no one could call home In a place I breathed and slept In a battle no one understood That continued all the same I sat defenseless and alone With the insignificance of my name In the midst of the Lord’s birth On a night meant to be peaceful In a country of the Prophet Where women don’t live free I spoke to God from the shaking Earth And prayed my mother would forgive me In a city without power In a desert torn by religion In a bank between two rivers We added up the decade’s cost And glorified the final hour Of a war that everyone had lost In the dust of helplessness In a concrete bunker In a fate I chose myself I waited without remorse To fight again as recompense For wasted lives and discourse -an original poem about an attack on our base in Iraq during the Arab Spring”

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Author:Dianna Skowera
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“Journalists are not entertainers. We are reporters. We go to places that are unpopular. We broadcast voices that are controversial. We are not here to win popularity contests. We are here to cover the issues critical to a democratic society. We have to pressure the media, to shame the media into going into these forgotten places where so many are sent to waste away in silence.”

GovernmentPoliticsJournalismIraq WarWar On TerrorMass MediaPolitical CorruptionProfiteering
Book:The Exception to the Rulers: Exposing Oily Politicians, War Profiteers, and the Media That Love Them
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“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)”

PalestineIraq WarZionistJewishZionismNazisAntisemitism
Author:Carlos Latuff
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“From seven hundred journalists at the beginning of March, the number had dwindled to about one hundred and fifty—print reporters, TV correspondents, photographers, cameramen, and support personnel. At the press center I encountered Kazem, who only a week before I had asked for help with my visa. “Why are you staying when everyone else is leaving?” he asked. I took a chance and replied in Arabic. Some journalists, I said, are as samid as the Iraqi people. Samid means “steadfast” and “brave” and is the adjective most often used by Iraqis to describe themselves. Kazem laughed and threw his arm around my shoulder.”

IraqJournalismIraq WarWar Correspondent
Book:And Then All Hell Broke Loose: Two Decades in the Middle East
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“The bombing started up again, with explosions all around us, in broad daylight, but no one in the restaurant even flinched. Iraqis seemed numb after a quarter century under Saddam’s whip-hand rule. It was heartbreaking to see what a harsh dictatorship can do to the human soul. In less than a week, I had grown almost inured to explosions and fires.”

IraqIraq WarWar Correspondent
Book:And Then All Hell Broke Loose: Two Decades in the Middle East
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“I may have been in stage four, but I wasn’t completely crazy. At least eighty-six journalists had been killed in Iraq, more than in any other conflict since World War II, and another thirty-eight had been taken hostage. More would die in the years to come. I knew I had to limit my movements and take special care when I did go out.”

JournalismIraq WarWar Correspondent
Book:And Then All Hell Broke Loose: Two Decades in the Middle East
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“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)”

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Author:Jen Sorensen
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“A poll when Blair left said that 69 per cent of people reckoned Blair’s legacy would be the Iraq War. I think that ignores his real record of achievement in dismantling the Labour movement. It’s amazing to think that the huge effort he went to creating a massive cash-for-honours scandal will be overshadowed. Blair was said to be saddened that he hasn’t managed to serve for as many years as Thatcher. Instead he will have to content himself with having killed more women and children than Genghis Khan. Ironically, for a man who is so obsessed with legacy, his memory will live on longer than most politicians—as a ghost story that Iraqi mothers use to frighten their children. That said, I do think that Blair stands a good chance of success in his new role of Peace Envoy. There’s a real chance that all those different groups in the Middle East will join together to try and kill him. In six months time he could be putting an end to years of suffering as he is sacrificed on an altar in the centre of Baghdad while everyone celebrates like it’s the end of a Star Wars movie.”

Iraq WarTony Blair
Book:My Shit Life So Far
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“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.”

Iraq WarNeoliberalismTony BlairLabour Party UkSir Keir StarmerLiz KendallMorgan Mcsweeney
Book:The Fraud: Keir Starmer, Morgan McSweeney, and the Crisis of British Democracy
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“[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]”

WarTimeLossWoundsInvasionIraq WarHealing The PastArabic PoetryArabic LiteratureThe Middle East
Author:Louis Yako
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“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.”

WarDeathHateRevengeIraq WarWar QuotesWar In IraqKilled In War
Book:Alive Day: A Memoir
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“As a Nobel Peace laureate, I, like most people, agonize over the use of force. But when it comes to rescuing an innocent people from tyranny or genocide, I've never questioned the justification for resorting to force. That's why I supported Vietnam's 1978 invasion of Cambodia, which ended Pol Pot's regime, and Tanzania's invasion of Uganda in 1979, to oust Idi Amin. In both cases, those countries acted without U.N. or international approval—and in both cases they were right to do so.”

WarPeaceUnited StatesIraqTyrannyGenocideVietnamUnited NationsIraq WarInternational LawPacifismCambodiaNobel Peace PrizeUgandaTanzaniaKhmer Rouge20041978Pol PotCambodian Vietnamese WarIdi AminUganda Tanzania War
Book:A Matter of Principle: Humanitarian Arguments for War in Iraq
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“Saddam's politics was the politics of the thug, of violence from the outset of his reign. Realism suggests that some people are not going to be tractable in response to purely peaceable overtures. Indeed, it certainly appears that some individuals, including notably Saddam Hussein, will cheerfully help themselves to a yard for every inch offered by well-meaning peacemakers. When we are dealing with customers as tough as that, there is no alternative to being tough ourselves.”

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Book:A Matter of Principle: Humanitarian Arguments for War in Iraq
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“You must know the difference between dissent from the Iraq war and the war on terror and undermining it. And any American that undermines that war, with our soldiers in the field, or undermines the war on terror, with 3,000 dead on 9/11, is a traitor. Everybody got it? Dissent, fine; undermining, you're a traitor. Got it? So, all those clowns over at the liberal radio network, we could incarcerate them immediately. Will you have that done, please? Send over the FBI and just put them in chains, because they, you know, they're undermining everything and they don't care, couldn't care less.”

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Author:Bill O'Reilly
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“With chemical film, it was possible to alter photographs, but you had to be an expert. That's not true any more. The LA Times fired a photographer at the beginning of the Iraq War for editing two shots together. Photography is crumbling. Certainly it is for the newspapers a bit now, isn't it? There will be painting again, absolutely!”

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Author:David Hockney
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