Virgil Goode Quotes

My personal missteps - how many Americans have died as a result of that? None. Other than my family, how many victims were there? None. And yet, in refusing to engage in a responsible debate about Iraq, how many Americans died? Thousands. And America seems to have no problem with that.

We must win in Iraq. If we withdraw, there will be chaos; there will be genocide; and they will follow us home.

My own prediction is that the Iraqis will all fly at each other’s throats and that there will be a bad slump in the administration that will continue until someone strong enough to dominate the country emerges, or, alternatively, until we have to step in and intervene.

Sure we won the war, but the peace we’re losing badly.

War is not popular politically because there is always a cost—a cost in people and a cost in money.

At least eighty thousand of our sons are dead or mangled. A million more will die of poverty and disease. Every issue could have been settled and better settled without the loss of a drop of blood

My generation knows the cost of short-sightedness in Iraq.

War damages men - and Syria is no different.

The war in Iraq, clearly has not turned out in the way that was hoped.

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

If you're going to write about war, which my books are about, wars are nasty things. I think it's sort of a cheap, easy way out to write a war story in which no one ultimately dies.

Before our kids start coming home from Iraq in body bags and women and children start dying in Baghdad, I need to know, what did Iraq do to us?

The only one who thinks the world is safer since the occupation of Iraq is Bush.

Once we destroyed the Saddam regime, we knew there was going to be a civil war.

Certain days I think definitely because we went in there and we got Saddam and that was our mission. On other days, we lost so many lives and so many brothers and sisters... on that aspect, no.

It is not only the living who are killed in war.

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

I saw clearly how those who saved the state so heroically and courageously in the War of Independence would be capable of bringing a catastrophe upon it if they are given the chance in normal times.

It's good to focus on the universal suffering that goes on in any war. Whatever the right and wrongs of the war, there is always universal suffering.

It is hard as an American to support the failure of American military operations in Iraq. Such failure will bring with it the death and wounding of many American service members, and many more Iraqis.

War is not cheap, but it's the human cost that's the highest.

if you allow…for a civil war to happen between the Shiites and the Sunnis, Iraq is finished forever. It will be dismembered. It will not only be dismembered, it will cause so many conflicts in the region that it will bring the whole region into a turmoil that will be hard to resolve

I’d rather build highways here then try nation building in Iraq

The U.S. military will be stepping into a morass. Iraq presents as unpromising a breeding ground for democracy as any in the world. It has never really known democracy or even legitimate, centralized rule for any great duration.

History will judge the war against Iraq not by the brilliance of its military execution, but by the effectiveness of the post-hostilities activities