Iraq is the first war in history where contractors have played a large role.
Never known as one to second-guess himself, the former president conceded problems in administering the Iraq war but was adamant he believed history would embrace the decision to go to war.
To those who were against the war in Iraq I say that history will prove them wrong, and that Britain and the United States did a great service to humanity by liquidating Saddam.
Mr. Obama in his address offered an abbreviated history of the costly Iraq war, but his focus was on the sacrifices of troops: Nearly 1.5 million men and women have served, more than 30, 000 have been wounded and nearly 4, 500 have died.
Indeed, the Iraq war is the first conflict in modern history where the U.S. having complied with the laws of war by promptly prosecuting American troops believed to have violated those laws did not bring to justice a single one of the hundreds of captured enemy combatants who have killed Iraqi civilians, American soldiers and contractors.
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Rumsfeld spoke briefly about the Abu Ghraib prison scandal, the war in Iraq and his own place in history.
The Iraq war has the distinction of having the highest wounded-to-dead ratio of any war in history.
In short, powerful sentences, Mr Abdolah draws a poignant and colourful picture of a humble life set against Iran's recent history: Reza Khan and the last Shah, the 1979 revolution, war with Iraq and fundamentalist terror.
But there is one thing we know already: the Americans that went to war in Iraq served their country as well as any generation of fighting men and women in our remarkable history.
The Persian Gulf War and the Iraq and Afghan Wars a decade later are the first major wars in America's history that have been fought without broad-based conscription to mobilize all levels of American society.
He certainly talked about big themes in terms of the war on terror, what was going on in Iraq, and that we are at a moment in history where we can't, as a nation, turn back from this war on terror.
Politicians often rewrite history to their own purposes, but, as Bush's analogy to Iraq suggested, there was more than passing significance to his revision of the history of the Spanish-American War.
Where he ran afoul of Republican orthodoxy is when he began to doubt the wisdom of the war in Iraq, a military campaign he eventually came to view as one of the biggest blunders in American history.
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