Top 35 Baghdad Quotes

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 Americans may think they have ‘liberated‘ Baghdad but the tens of thousands of thieves – they came in families and cruised the city in trucks and cars searching for booty – seem to have a different idea what liberation means.

All of Vegas is false. There’s a false Paris, a false Venice, a false Baghdad – in fact, all of the early Vegas aesthetic is Baghdad, which is also the irony. It’s ‘Aladdin,’ the sands, ‘One Thousand and One Nights.’

That is why we wholeheartedly support the American-led effort to free the people of Iraq. And though we are a small country with a small military, we are proud to stand side by side with our allies in the fight to end the reign of terror in Baghdad.

They’re not even within 100 miles of Baghdad. They are not in any place. They hold no place in Iraq. This is an illusion… they are trying to sell to the others an illusion.

The American surge of combat forces into Baghdad that was ordered by President Bush worked. And there was a calm, a relative calm that descended on the country kind of late 2008. That pretty much held until the last American combat soldiers left at the end of 2011.

Prime Minister Maliki, released from American restraint, acted on his worst instincts, creating enormous distrust in Iraq’s Kurdish population and deeply embittering Sunnis in western Iraq’s Al Anbar, who lost any confidence in a Baghdad government they saw as adversarial.

It’s so jarring to go from Baghdad to Cambridge, to go from a place where people are fighting and striving and dying to a place where the biggest concern is what kind of cheese to put in your sandwich.

If one’s memories of Baghdad women were only of those to be seen in the streets, they would be of leathery, wrinkled faces, prematurely old, figures which have lost all shape, and henna-stained hands crinkled and deformed by toil.

You gotta love the names. They’re so eager, earnest, and hopeful: Camp Prosperity, Camp Liberty, and Camp Victory are the names of just a few of the U.S. military bases in Baghdad.

I don’t think we handled the aftermath of the fall of Baghdad as well as we might have. But that’s now history.

The mission statement was ordered, and it sent the 800th MP Brigade, effective the first of July, up to Baghdad. I joined my brigade to take command at the end of June.

As a nation, Kuwait has been, arguably, free of freedom itself. Claimed in turn by Constantinople, Riyadh, and Baghdad, Kuwait has survived by playing Turks off Persians, Arabs off one another, and the English off everyone.

Terrorists bombard complete cities, such as Fallujah, Baghdad, innocent women and children.

Today‘s message to Baghdad is very clear: the UN Security Council resolution expresses the unity and determination of the entire international community to assume its collective responsibility.

It’s going to be a long, hot summer. The hotter it gets in Baghdad, the hotter it will get in D.C.

The situation in Iraq was dire at the end of 2006, when President George W. Bush decided to implement the surge and selected me to command it. Indeed, when I returned to Baghdad in early February 2007, I found the conditions there to be even worse than I had expected.

I miss aspects of being in the Arab world – the language – and there is a tranquility in these cities with great rivers. Whether it’s Cairo or Baghdad, you sit there and you think, ‘This river has flown here for thousands of years.’ There are magical moments in these places.

I was with the 101st Airborne Division in Iraq, really in the middle of nowhere, about 80 miles south of Baghdad. And it was almost midnight, and I got a computer message from the home office of the Washington Post asking me to call them. I did call them and was told that I’d won the Pulitzer Prize.

The fact is that as soon as they reach Baghdad gates, we will besiege them and slaughter them. Until now they have refused to do battle with us. They are just going places. One can describe them as a boa: when it feels threatened, it runs to somewhere else.

Prime Minister Menachem Begin ordered the destruction of an Iraqi nuclear reactor near Baghdad in 1981. This action delayed an Iraqi bomb by at least 15 years. The whole world condemned Israel – only to realize later how farsighted it had been.

They do believe that if we do not wage this war against terror in places like Baghdad and Kabul, we are more likely to have it waged in Baltimore and Kansas.

But all that having been said, you can’t, in a city of a million people like Karbala, or 5 million like Baghdad, you can’t be in all places at all times.

I had no idea what it would be like to be a bomb tech in Baghdad until I got there so I didn’t know what to expect. It was very eye-opening.

I took a trip in 2004, a year after the war started in Iraq. I played music on the streets of Baghdad for Iraqi civilians. I’d also play for U.S. soldiers at night when they were off duty in the bars. Then I would talk to people, and I would film them and ask them about their life and the conflict.

Baghdad is altogether built of chrome-yellow kiln-dried bricks.

I left Kurdistan in April 2003 with the peshmerga, following their excited advance as Saddam‘s forces crumbled. First Kirkuk, then Mosul – where looters broke into the city museum and seized its Parthian sculptures – then Tikrit. I reported from Baghdad in month-long stints until the end of 2004.

Well, I’ve been to Iraq twice now. I was in Baghdad in June and then north of Baghdad in November.

There are no American infidels in Baghdad. Never!

You take one bomber and deploy him in Baghdad, and another is manufactured in Riyadh the next day. It’s exactly like when you take the toy off the shelf at Wal-Mart and another is made in Shen Zhen the next day.

These poor kids in Baghdad have no running water, no showers. They wipe with baby wipes. My heart goes out to them.

I considered myself very lucky after ‘Baghdad Cafe,’ and I have ‘The Shield.’ In every genre, I’ve kicked butt at some point. I’m real happy.

I think unleashing 3,000 smart bombs against the city of Baghdad in the first several days of the war… to me, if those were unleashed against the San Francisco Bay Area, I would call that an act of extreme terrorism.

If we can rebuild Iraq, we can rebuild Illinois and Indiana and if we can do Baghdad, we can do Baltimore.

When I first arrived in Baghdad in January 2003, I thought I would soon rent a house and envisioned myself swimming in the Tigris to cool off after reporting in the city the caliphs called Madinit al-Salam, the City of Peace. A year later, I realized I wouldn’t be taking any midnight dips – Madinat al-Salam no more.