Flashback: What Neocons Told Us about Iraq

Dick Cheney

• "I think they're in the last throes, if you will, of the insurgency." June 20, 2005 (Source) 
• "I think things have gotten so bad inside Iraq, from the standpoint of the Iraqi people, my belief is we will, in fact, be greeted as liberators. . . . I think it will go relatively quickly, . . . (in) weeks rather than months." March 16, 2003 (Source)
• “Simply stated, there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction. There is no doubt he is amassing them to use against our friends, against our allies, and against us.” (Source)
• "If we had to do it over again we would do exactly the same thing.” September 13, 2006 (Source)
• “What we did in Iraq was exactly the right thing to do. If I had it to recommend all over again, I would recommend exactly the same course of action.” October 5, 2004 (Source)

Bill Kristol

• “Very few wars in American history were prepared better or more thoroughly than this one by this president.” July 15, 2007 (Source)
• "This is going to be a two month war, not an eight year war." March 28, 2003 (Source)
• "There has been a certain amount of pop sociology... that the Shi'a can't get along with the Sunni... there's almost no evidence of that at all.” April 4, 2003 (Fox News w/ Bill O’Reilly)
• "“The first two battles of this new era are now over. The battles of Afghanistan and Iraq have been won decisively and honorably.” April 28, 2003 (Source)
• “… there are hopeful signs that Iraqis of differing religious, ethnic, and political persuasions can work together. This is a far cry from the predictions made before the war by many, both here and in Europe, that a liberated Iraq would fracture into feuding clans and unleash a bloodbath.” March 22, 2004 (Source) 
• “… the continuing debates over the terms of a final constitution, have in fact demonstrated something remarkable in Iraq: a willingness on the part of the diverse ethnic and religious groups to disagree--peacefully--and then to compromise.” March 22, 2004 (Source) 

Paul Wolfowitz

• “There's a lot of money to pay for this. It doesn't have to be U.S. taxpayer money. We are dealing with a country that can really finance its own reconstruction, and relatively soon.” March 27, 2003 (Source)
• On weapons of mass destruction: “There's no question in my mind that there was something there. There are just too many pieces of evidence and we'll get to the bottom of it.” August 1, 2003 (Source)
• “Some of the higher-end predictions that we have been hearing recently, such as the notion that it will take several hundred thousand U.S. troops to provide stability in post-Saddam (Hussein) Iraq, are wildly off the mark.” February 27, 2003 (Source)
• "It's hard to conceive that it would take more forces to provide stability in post-Saddam Iraq than it would take to conduct the war itself and to secure the surrender of Saddam’s security forces and his army. Hard to imagine." Feb. 27, 2003 (Source)
• "Peacekeeping requirements in Iraq might be much lower than historical experience in the Balkans suggests. There's been none of the record in Iraq of ethnic militias fighting one another that produced so much bloodshed and permanent scars in Bosnia along with the requirement for large policing forces to separate those militias.” Feb. 27, 2003 (Source)
• “These are Arabs, 23 million of the most educated people in the Arab world, who are going to welcome us as liberators.” Feb. 27, 2003 (Source)
• "The Iraqi people understand what this crisis is about. Like the people of France in the 1940s, they view us as their hoped-for liberator.” March 11, 2003 (Source)
• "The truth is that for reasons that have a lot to do with the U.S. government bureaucracy, we settled on the one issue that everyone could agree on, which was weapons of mass destruction, as the core reason." May 28, 2003 (Source)