Ben Rhodes Quotes

When you decide to get involved in a military operation in a place like Syria, you've got to be prepared, as we learned from Iraq and Afghanistan, to become the government, and I'm not sure any country, either the United States or I don't hear of anyone else, who's willing to take on that responsibility.

People make mistakes. And one of the mistakes that the United States consistently made was that it could intervene and somehow adjust people's governments, especially in the Middle East.

I'm no friend of Tony Blair's and I consider the Middle East policies of the United States and the UK fatal.

The American people are sick of our failed regime change wars.

Our safety at home and the cause of freedom abroad is largely contingent upon our success in Iraq.

Iraq is part of a legitimate American effort not to have democracy everywhere but to have democracy somewhere.

The mistake that was made was, of course, leaving Saddam in charge of affairs over there.

My goal in Baghdad was to facilitate a debate here in the United States on America's policy toward Iraq, a debate that's been sadly lacking.

And in Iraq we tried to implement the same policy that was so successful in Saudi Arabia, but Saddam Hussein didn't buy. When the economic hit men fail in this scenario, the next step is what we call the jackals.

We should not act as if we were an imperialist power, willy-nilly moving into capitals in that part of the world, taking down governments.

A U.S. invasion of Iraq could turn the whole region into a cauldron, and thus destroy the war on terrorism. A military campaign very likely would have to be followed by a large-scale, long-term military occupation.

Someone should tell the president that U.S. forces would need to be in Iraq for two to five years, and they will not have an easy time there.

We are caught in the Middle East in supporting the bad guys in order to get rid of the worse guys.

The Iraq War is an incredibly strategic blunder of enormous proportions …. There was not an exit strategy because the people planning this war didn’t intend to leave.

Preemption, democracy promoting and nation building have all been sullied by association by association with the War in Iraq.

I don’t think that we have ever had a coherent strategy on Iraq.

…The invasion of Iraq was the worst foreign policy mistake in American history. We invaded a country that was no threat to us…. We have lost so much of our world prestige and world leadership.

There is no question that what we are seeing - the horrible advance of ISIS - goes back, if you will, to the original sin of the invasion of Iraq.

The 2003 war in Iraq may be considered the greatest error in American policy since the Civil War. Its ramifications are earth-shattering and will impact us and our safety for generations. It may completely unravel the entire Middle East forever.

Back in the 1950s, America set out to intervene in Syria, liberate the people from a corrupt elite, and bring about a new democracy. They did this with the best of intentions, but it led to disaster. And out of that disaster, the Assad regime rose to power.

America went into Iraq. We shouldn't have gone into Iraq. We shouldn't have gotten out the way we got out. The world is a total mess.

The Bush administration has created an unimaginable catastrophe in Iraq. This should've been one of the easiest military occupations in history and they succeeded in turning it into one of the worst military disasters in history. They can't control it and it's almost impossible for them to get out for reasons you can't discuss in the United States because to discuss the reasons why they can't get out would be to concede the reasons why they invaded.

We, Britain and Germany, can neither of us be happy about our handling of the Iraq war.

The west has a great deal to answer for in the Middle East, from Britain's belated empire-building after the First World War to the US and British policy that condemns modern Iraq to the material and social squalor of a half-century ago.

There's a certain amount of sympathy here for the Bush administration's problem, which is they would like to get rid of Saddam Hussein and they would like to have the Kurds autonomous.