yaoiween 2022 is CANCELED

I firmly believed we should not march in Baghdad. . . . To occupy Iraq would instantly shatter our coalition, turning the whole Arab world against us and make a broken tyrant into a latter-day Arab hero . . . assigning young soldiers to a fruitless hunt for a securely entrenched dictator and condemning them to fight in what would be an unwinnable guerrilla war. . . . Furthermore, we have been self-consciously trying to set a pattern for handing aggression in the post-Cold War world. Going in and occupying Iraq, thus unilaterally exceeding the United Nations' mandate, would have destroyed the precedent of international response to aggression that we hoped to establish. Had we gone the invasion route, the United States could conceivably still be an occupying power in a bitterly hostile land. -Bush Sr., President of the United States, in his 1998 book, A World Transformed, on the Gulf War of 1991.

The United Nations served as an imprimatur for a policy the United States wanted to follow and either persuaded or coerced everybody else to support. The Security Council thus played fast and loose with the provisions of the UN Charter. -Stephen Lewis, Canada's Ambassador to the UN at the time, about the Gulf War.

Lesley Stahl: 'We have heard that a half million children have died [because of sanctions against Iraq]. I mean, that's more children than died in Hiroshima and you know, is the price worth it?' President Clinton's Secretary of State Madeleine Albright: 'I think this is a very hard choice, but the price . . . we think the price is worth it.' -On American TV programme 60 minutes in May 1996.

Dear President Bush, I'm sure you'll be having a nice little tea party with your fellow war criminal, Tony Blair. Please wash the cucumber sandwiches down with a glass of blood. -Harold Pinter, British playwright, in an open letter published in The Guardian.

George Bush was not elected by a majority of the voters in the United States, he was appointed by God. -General Jerry Boykin, Deputy Undersecretary of Defense for intelligence, in charge of facilitating intelligence information for Donald Rumsfeld's 'High Value Target Plan', aimed at hunting down Saddam Hussein, Osama bin Laden, and Mullah Omar.

[President George W. Bush is] the greatest threat to life on this planet that we've most probably ever seen. -Ken Livingston, Mayor of London.

And, before it is all over, democracy, noble and delicate as it is, may give way. . . . Indeed, democracy is the special condition that we will be called up to defend in the coming years. That will be enormously difficult because of the combination of the corporations, the military and the complete investiture of the flag with mass spectator sports has set up a pre-fascist atmosphere in America already. -Norman Mailer, American novelist.

Fascism should more properly be called corporatism, since it is the merger of state and corporate power. -Benito Mussolini, founder of Italian fascism.

You call Donald Rumsfeld and tell him our sorry asses are ready to go home. - Pfc. Matthew C. O'Dell, a US infantryman serving in Iraq, as quoted in New York Times, June 15 2003.

We lack the metrics to know if we are winning or losing the global war on terror. -US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, in a confidential memo, 16 October 2003.

The message is that there are known knowns, there are things that we know that we know. There are known unknowns that is to say, there are things that we now know we don't know. But there are also unknown unknowns . . . things we do not know we don't know. And each year we discover a few more of those unknown unknowns. -Donald Rumsfeld, on why US charges against Saddam turned out to be false.

The trumped up reasons for going to war have collapsed. All the Administration's rationalizations as we prepared to go to war now stand revealed as 'double-talk'. The American people were told Saddam Hussein was building nuclear weapons. He was not. We were told he had stockpiles of other weapons of mass destruction. He did not. We were told he was involved in 9/11. He was not. We were told Iraq was attracting terrorists from Al Qaida. It was not. We were told our soldiers would be viewed as liberators. They are not. We were told Iraq could pay for its own reconstruction. It cannot. We were told the war would make America safer. It has not. . . . Before the war, wek after week after week after week, we were told lie after lie after lie after lie. -US Senate Statement by Senator Ted Kennedy.

Every ten years or so, the United States needs to pick up some small crappy little country and throw it against the wall, just to show the world we mean business. -Michael Ledeen, holder of the Freedom Chair at the American Enterprise Institute.

You've got to go where the oil is. -US Vice President Dick Cheney.