A Quote by William Odom

Once we destroyed the Saddam regime, we knew there was going to be a civil war. — © William Odom
Once we destroyed the Saddam regime, we knew there was going to be a civil war.
Few Americans born after the Civil War know much about war. Real war. War that seeks you out. War that arrives on your doorstep - not once in a blue moon, but once a month or a week or a day.
Structurally, as is evident, the role of the 'Islamic Terror' is to fill the gap left by the disintegration of Stalinism. That is why Saddam's quasi-Stalinist Baathist regime was the perfect transitional object for the U.S. in the immediate years after the Cold War ended. Saddam was no more a Muslim than Stalin was a Christian.
We now believe it is appropriate for Saddam Hussein to be forced to change, either by the threat of war, and therefore that compels him to cooperate. If he cooperates, then the basis of changed regime policy has shifted because his regime has, in fact, changed its policy to one of cooperation. So if he cooperates, then that is different than if he does not cooperate.
[Even if the U.S. doesn't attack] Saddam Hussein is not going to survive. His regime is on the verge of implosion.
The Syrian civil war is a "crime initiated by the United States and the Zionist regime, Israel."
We've seen the reality of Saddam's regime: his thugs prepared to kill their own people, the parading of prisoners of war and now the release of those pictures of executed British soldiers.
Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein brutally repressed all forms of opposition to his regime, and before the Iraq War, al Qaeda had no presence in Iraq.
I knew that's where I was going. I knew we were going to Italy. You couldn't make this movie in America at this price. I knew it was going to be big. I knew there was going to be a ship involved and that there was going to be a set as big as the ship. I thought, well, here we go. But I knew that was where he was headed. He had been going this way for some time. All directors, once they have some success, they want to spend a whole heck of a lot of money. (Something else can't hear.)
I went to live in Barcelona in 1975, when I was twenty. Even before I went there, I knew more about the Spanish Civil War than I did about the Irish Civil War. I liked Barcelona, and then I grew to like a place in the Catalan Pyrenees called the Pillars, especially an area between the village of Flavors and the high mountains around it.
Regime change has been an American policy under the Clinton administration, and it is the current policy. I support the policy. But regime change in and of itself is not sufficient justification for going to war--particularly unilaterally--unless regime change is the only way to disarm Iraq of the weapons of mass destruction pursuant to the United Nations resolution.
The war on terror involves Saddam Hussein because of the nature of Saddam Hussein, the history of Saddam Hussein, and his willingness to terrorize himself.
After they killed Uday and Qusay, the focus centered on Saddam: Find him, kill him, capture him, whatever it takes. To me, it was a false sense of security: If we get Saddam, we're going to win this war.
And if there was one title that could be applied to all my films, it would be 'Civil War' - not civil war in the way we know it, but the daily war that goes on between us all.
As a kid, I was growing up in an era of celebration of the Civil War centennial, with a lot of 'Lost Cause' emphasis on the Confederacy. I used to play Civil War soldiers with my brothers as a child, and my older brother always insisted that he got to be Lee, and I got be Grant. I never knew that Grant won until quite some time had passed.
The question of what actually caused the Civil War is secondary to the result of the Civil War, which is that after the war was over, slavery was ended, and the North and the South reconciled. And I think we need to respect that.
We have to go massively, like we did in the first Gulf War where we destroyed Saddam's ability to take Kuwait. We need to have a coalition that will stand for nothing less than the total destruction of ISIS and we have to be the leader.
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