Four years of 'catastrophic success'
"Major combat operations in Iraq have ended. In the battle of Iraq, the United States and our allies have prevailed." –George Bush, standing under a "Mission Accomplished" banner on the USS Lincoln aircraft carrier, May 2, 2003
"I think [the war will] go relatively quickly." When pressed to offer a more precise estimate of how long the war would take, Cheney replied: "Weeks rather than months." - March 16, 2003
The Iraq war "could last six days, six weeks. I doubt six months." - Donald Rumsfeld - February 7, 2003
"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." –Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, testifying before the House Budget Committee prior to the Iraq war
"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." --Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, "Vanity Fair" interview, May 28, 2003
"I think the burden is on those people who think he didn't have weapons of mass destruction to tell the world where they are." –White House Press Secretary Ari Fleischer, July 9, 2003
"Had we to do it over again, we would look at the consequences of catastrophic success, being so successful so fast that an enemy that should have surrendered or been done in escaped and lived to fight another day." —George Bush, telling Time magazine that he underestimated the Iraqi resistance, Aug. 2004
"Oh, no, we're not going to have any casualties." —George Bush, discussing the Iraq war with Christian broadcaster Pat Robertson
"Patriotism means to stand by the country. It does not mean to stand by the President or any other public official save exactly to the degree in which he himself stands by the country. It is patriotic to support him insofar as he efficiently serves the country. It is unpatriotic not to oppose him to the exact extent that by inefficiency or otherwise he fails in his duty to stand by the country." - Theodore Roosevelt
