I wanted the American eagle to go screaming into the East ...Why not spread its wings over the cradle of humanity, I asked myself? ... I said to myself, Here are a people who have suffered for centuries. We can make them as free as ourselves, give them a government and country of their own, put a miniature of the American Constitution afloat in the desert, start a brand new republic to take its place among the free nations of the world. It seemed to me a great task to which we had addressed ourselves. But I have thought some more, since then, and I have read carefully the Iraqi Constitution, and I have seen that we do not intend to free, but to subjugate the people of the Iraq. We have gone there to conquer, not to redeem. It should, it seems to me, be our pleasure and duty to make those people free, and let them deal with their own domestic questions in their own way. And so I am an anti-imperialist. I am opposed to having the eagle put its talons on any other land.
- Mark Twain (paraphrased)
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