Noam Chomsky Iraq Quotations

The Washington leadership has put aside non-proliferation programmes and devoted its energies and resources to driving the country to war by extraordinary deceit, then trying to manage the catastrophe it created in Iraq.

The United States was seriously defeated in Iraq by Iraqi nationalism - mostly by nonviolent resistance. The United States could kill the insurgents, but they couldn't deal with half a million people demonstrating in the streets.

Qatar-based 'Al-Jazeera,' the most important news channel in the Arab world, was harshly criticized by high U.S. officials for having 'emphasized civilian casualties' during the destruction of Falluja. The problem of independent media was later resolved when the channel was kicked out of Iraq in preparation for free elections.

Spaniards were condemned for appeasing terrorism by voting for withdrawing troops from Iraq in the absence of U.N. authorization - that is, for taking a stand rather like that of 70 percent of Americans, who called for the U.N. to take the leading role in Iraq.

The U.S. is not constructing a palatial embassy, by far the largest in the world and virtually a separate city within Baghdad, and pouring money into military bases, with the intention of leaving Iraq to Iraqis.

In November 2007, the White House issued a Declaration of Principles demanding that U.S. forces must remain indefinitely in Iraq and committing Iraq to privilege American investors.

Radical Islamist extremists surely hope that an attack on Iraq will kill many people and destroy much of the country, providing recruits for terrorist actions.

I don't see any possibility of Britain and the U.S. allowing a sovereign independent Iraq; that's almost inconceivable.

[According to the rigid dogma] we have to believe the United States would have so-called liberated Iraq even if its main products were lettuce and pickles and the main energy resource of the world were in central Africa.

The number of people killed by the sanctions in Iraq is greater than the total number of people killed by all weapons of mass destruction in all of history.

ISIS is a monstrosity. It didn't come from nowhere. It's one of the results of the U.S. hitting a very vulnerable society - Iraq - with a sledgehammer.

The invasion of Iraq was simply a war crime. Straight-out war crime.

Somebodys paying the corporations that destroyed Iraq and the corporations that are rebuilding it. Theyre getting paid by the American taxpayer in both cases. So we pay them to destroy the country, and then we pay them to rebuild it. Those are gifts from U.S. taxpayer to U.S. corporations...

Some international law specialists compare the invasion of Iraq to the 'crimes against the peace' for which Nazi leaders were indicted at Nuremberg.

The Iraq War was the first conflict in western history in which an imperialist war was massively protested against before it had even been launched.

When Britain and the U.S. invaded Iraq, it was with the reasonable expectation that it was going to increase the threat of terror, as it has.

The United States invaded Iraq to gain control of one of the major sources of the world's energy.