Iraq II: Quotes du Jour

Senator Chuck Hagen, the Nebraska Republican and Vietnam veteran, on the state of the war and a new strategy under which additional U.S. troops will be sent into Baghdad to expel militias:

[Iraq is] an absolute a replay of Vietnam.

That isn't going to do any good. It's going to have a worse effect. They're destroying the United States Army.

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Retired Marine Colonel Thomas X. Hammes:

Talking about a new strategy is useless until we get a new team — in the Pentagon, in the Administration. These guys have screwed up everything. They haven't got the credibility to implement anything.

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Noah Feldman, a senior adjunct fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, in a review of new Iraq War books for the Sunday Times Book Review:

Critics of American policy in Iraq since 2003 have sometimes charged that the United States created the sectarian divisions in the country by treating Iraqis as Shiites, Sunnis or Kurds, rather than simply as Iraqis. But the opposite has in fact been the case. Under the influence of exiles like Ahmad Chalabi, administration officials anachronistically insisted that Iraq was cosmopolitan and postethnic. The most serious intellectual deficit that has plagued the American presence in Iraq — and a crucial reason for our repeated failure to predict Iraqis’ behavior — has been insufficient awareness of the conflicting perspectives of Iraqis from different backgrounds and communities.

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Representative Tom DeLay, the Texas Republican, criticizing Bill Clinton's decision to send soldiers to Bosnia in 1999:

You can support the troops but not the president.