Phil Klay Quotes
I didn't want to write a 'this is how it is' Iraq book, because the Iraq War is an intensely complicated variety of things.
Klay, Phil. Interview by Terry Gross. Fresh Air, NPR, 26 Mar. 2014.
He is one of very few high defense establishment figures to admit publicly what almost all say privately. Wars rarely run according to plan, and the complexity defies analysis and explanation even many years afterward.
So far as the Iraq government was concerned the important enemy were the minority Sunni Muslims who had dominated the Shiites before the American Invasion. For America the enemy was Al Qaeda and the terrorists as well as the Sunnis. We ended up fighting Sunnis and even Shiites as the definition of the enemy changed with time.
The “surge” was the short term injection of a large number of American combat troops into Iraq when the Iraq War was going badly. President George W. Bush, who at the urging of Vice President Cheney and the neoconservatives had invaded Iraq and while the invasion went well the administration botched the so-called peace and America was in the midst of a Iraqi civil war. Bush went ahead with the surge despite the advice of the Joint Chiefs. What makes the quotation particularly interesting, beyond the fact that the senior military advice was ignored, was that the President had always campaigned on the principle that the President should listen to the senior American Military officials on military tactics and strategy. He like Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, Dwight Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy, and other presidents found that the military leadership perspective was often very narrow and not even militarily infallible. The Iraq War turned in our favor after the surge albeit that there have been arguments since then as to whether or not the surge was the reason or was it due to other factors which occurred at the same time. Probably, all were factors.
1914 was the outbreak of WWI in which all the belligerents had very different interests and reasons for war—even allies on the same side greatly differed as to their motivation for fighting.
The Wars continued over a decade, costing thousands of American (and Coalition) troops their lives, many more their limbs and mental well-being, with a monetary cost of over trillions of dollars, and the achievements have been few and meager.
At the time she was herself in exile in Jordan where she worked with the over 1 million Arab refugees (from both Syria and Iraq) in Jordanian refugee camps. The contrast between the two groups of refugees she found dramatic.
His perception that the loss of the war for the South was God’s retribution for Southern Slavery and treason was very common in the North. The young man was shocked at the difference between the educational levels of he and his Michigan comrades vis a vis their Southern counterparts. The Southern slave-centered economy didn’t provide a very good education, even for its own white citizens. 150 years after the Civil War, the South was generally behind the rest of the country in average educational.achievement.
He had been asked by a reporter if his Marines would be able to take Baghdad in the American invasion of Iraq, 2007. Kelly commanded the Marines charged with taking Baghdad. They did.
Phil Klay (/ˈklaɪ/; born 1983) is an American writer. He won the National Book Award for fiction in 2014 for his first book-length publication, a collection of short stories, Redeployment. In 2014 the National Book Foundation named him a 5 under 35 honoree. He was a United States Marine officer from 2005 to 2009.
