Pre-War Planning Quotes

No one starts a war—or rather, no one in his senses ought to do so—without first being clear in his mind what he intends to achieve by that war, and how he intends to conduct it.

We went in there [the Iraq War invasion] with a complete misunderstanding, regionally and inside Iraq, of what was going on. I don’t ever want that to happen again.

The intelligence failures with respect to Iraq were massive and have damaged our credibility around the world.

All the calamities that followed the invasion [of Iraq] were not only foreseeable, they were foreseen.

Gentlemen of the Congress of the United States who put us into this war, it is your duty now to give us sufficient means of making war. If the folks at home did not want you to go to war, it was your duty to think of that before you declared war. It is in no way right or reasonable or wise or patriotic for you to project the Nation into war, and then in unfounded fear for your own future, deny the Nation the method best qualified and calculated to make victorious war.

We do not agree that hindsight is required. The risks of internal strife in Iraq, active Iranian pursuit of its interests, regional instability, and al-Qaeda activity in Iraq, were each explicitly identified before the invasion.

The bottom line is that the CIA knew before the war, during and war, and after the war where most of these chemicals were and most of these biological agents.

In the lead up to the Iraq war and its later conduct, I saw at a minimum, true dereliction, negligence and irresponsibility, at worse, lying, incompetence and corruption.