Quotes of the Morning: Why Again?

“President Bush and his vice president conceded yesterday in the clearest terms yet that Saddam Hussein had no weapons of mass destruction, trying to shift the Iraq war debate to a new issue – whether the invasion was justified because Hussein was abusing a U.N. oil-for-food program.”
-Associated Press, October 8, 2004

“I remember that.. The war was needed because Saddam was cheating the system and was going to use that money to rebuild his WMD program.”
-Skippy

"The problem here is that there will always be some uncertainty about how quickly he can acquire nuclear weapons. But we don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud."
-Condoleezza Rice, September 8, 2002

“Sure, they were upset about the lack of WMD, but we needed to go in because of Saddam’s growing threat.”
-Skippy

"We were all unhappy that the intelligence was not as good as we had thought that it was. But the essential judgment was absolutely right. Saddam Hussein was a threat."
-Condoleeza Rice, October 3, 2004.

“You know, they should arrest all of those horrible enablers who were supplying Saddam with that money. Without them Saddam wouldn’t have been able to do.. um.. whatever it is that he supposedly did. Buy solid gold bathtubs?”
-Skippy

“Chevron, the second-largest American oil company, is preparing to acknowledge that it should have known kickbacks were being paid to Saddam Hussein on oil it bought from Iraq as part of a defunct United Nations program, according to investigators.
The admission is part of a settlement being negotiated with United States prosecutors and includes fines totaling $25 million to $30 million, according to the investigators, who declined to be identified because the settlement was not yet public.
[…]
According to the Volcker report, surcharges on Iraqi oil exports were introduced in August 2000 by the Iraqi state oil company, the State Oil Marketing Organization. At the time, Condoleezza Rice, now secretary of state, was a member of Chevron’s board and led its public policy committee, which oversaw areas of potential political concerns for the company.
Ms. Rice resigned from Chevron’s board on Jan. 16, 2001, after being named national security advisor by President Bush.”
-New York Times, May 8, 2007

“Oops. Still, no matter what the reason, we had to take out Saddam. He was a monster. Removing him from power was just the Christian thing to do..”
-Skippy

“Before the US invasion in March 2003 there were estimated to be around 800,000 Christians in Iraq, around three percent of the otherwise largely Muslim population, living mainly in urban centres such as Baghdad.
Although there were some attacks on churches in the immediate aftermath of the fall of Saddam Hussein, Iraq's Christians were not especially targeted while rival Sunni and Shiite Muslim factions went to war.
As a relatively wealthy community, however, many Christians fell prey to kidnap and ransom gangs and many -- probably more than half -- of them have fled the country or moved to the relative safety of Iraqi Kurdistan.
Now there are reports that Salafist groups such as Al-Qaeda, fundamentalists who believe Islam can be renewed by returning to the values of the era of the Prophet Mohammed, are targeting Christians on purely sectarian grounds.”
-AFP, May 10, 2007

Many churches are now nearly empty, with many of their faithful either gone or too scared to attend. Only about 30 people attended this Sunday's mass at St. Joseph's Catholic Church in the relatively safe Baghdad neighborhood of Karradah, and only two dozen took communion in the barren St. Mary's Church in the northern city of Kirkuk on Sunday.
As many as 50 percent of Iraq's Christians may already have left the country, according to a report issued Wednesday by the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom, a federal monitoring and advisory group in Washington D.C.
‘These groups face widespread violence from Sunni insurgents and foreign jihadis, and they also suffer pervasive discrimination and marginalization at the hands of the national government, regional governments, and para-state militias,’ said the report.
Islamic extremists have also targeted liquor stores, hair salons and other Christian-owned businesses, saying they violate Islam, the report said.
‘This is not the culture of Iraqis or the nature of Iraqis. We have lived during centuries together in a respectful attitude and friendship,’ said Luwis Zarco, the Catholic archbishop of Kirkuk.
-Associated Press, May 7, 2007

"..unless you happened to live in Iraq, which was a secular nation that kept its different religions living together in peace. Ok.. The Christian angle isn’t working. Let’s use the other typical angle. We had to go into Iraq for the children who were being raised in a horrible oppressive regime.”
-Skippy

“You know.. for kids.”
- Norville Barnes, The Hudsucker Proxy

“The chance that an Iraqi child will live beyond age five has plummetted faster than anywhere else in the world since 1990, said a report released Tuesday, which placed the country last in its child survival rankings.
One in eight Iraqi children died of disease or violence before reaching their fifth birthday in 2005, said the report by Save the Children, which said Iraq ranked last because it had made the least progress toward improving child survival rates.
Iraq's mortality rate has soared by 150 per cent since 1990. Even before the latest war, Iraq was plagued by electricity shortages, a lack of clean water and too few hospitals.”
-Associated Press, May 7, 2007

“And why was Iraq plagued by electricity shortages, a lack of clean water and too few hospitals (other than Saddam’s solid gold bathtubs)? Oh yeah, sanctions and the oil for food program! Weird how this all comes around.”
-Skippy