Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Putin is behaving in a very dangerous way. And Donald Trump sounds as though he would simply sit back and allow that to go on. I worry about where that would end up.
We did not go to war in Afghanistan or in Iraq to, quote, 'impose democracy.' We went to war in both places because we saw those regimes as a threat to the United States.
I'm not sure the oil producers are enjoying real growth. That troubles me. For experience has shown that oil can be more of a curse than a blessing. And not only in Africa.
I think all foreigners should stop interfering in the internal affairs of Iraq. Those who want to come and help are welcome. Those who come to interfere and destroy are not.
Donald Trump seems to be unconcerned about the Russian aggression in Ukraine. By doing this he tells them that they can go ahead and do what they are doing. That is dangerous.
Every math curriculum in the world is based on the idea of hand-calculating, and most of what you're teaching is how to calculate. And I think the resistance to this is very variable.
No one argues that we should have imposed a dictatorship in Afghanistan having liberated the country. Similarly, we weren't about to impose a dictatorship in Iraq having liberated the country.
It's wonderful that so many people want to contribute to fighting aids or malaria. But, if somebody isn't paying attention to the overall health system in the country, a whole lot of money can be wasted.
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.
We are already seeing a degree of instability in the world because Obama seems to have consciously wanted to step back. Donald Trump is going to be "Obama squared," a more extreme version of the same thing.
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 secure the surrender of Saddam's security forces and his army. Hard to imagine.
NATO is still the most remarkable alliance in history. It stuck together through 40 years of Cold War, and it then joined together to fight in Afghanistan. In the 1980s, I would not have thought this was going to be possible.
China, in the future, is going to have even more nuclear capability than it has had in the past. I don't believe that they have anything to fear from the United States, and I frankly don't believe they do fear the United States.
Someone once said that history has more imagination than all the scenario writers in the Pentagon, and we have a lot of scenario writers here. No one ever wrote a scenario for commercial airliners crashing into the World Trade Center.
I think Obama sees everything through one lens. Doing nothing in the face of the slaughter in Syria is not only shameful, it is unrealistic. This approach leaves Syria as a broken country and a breeding ground for extremists for decades.
If the Arab world today looked like Tunisia, it would be a huge blow for the extreme ideologies. But Tunisia needs more support than it is getting, particularly from their close neighbors in Europe who have a great stake in North Africa.
I think that all countries that participate in multilateral institutions see the institutions as a way of advancing what they view as their national interests and they see in many cases multi-lateral institution as the best way to do that.
I think one has to say it's not just simply a matter of capturing people and holding them accountable, but removing the sanctuaries, removing the support systems, ending states who sponsor terrorism. And that's why it has to be a broad and sustained campaign.
There's a lot of money to pay for this ... the oil revenues of that country could bring between $50 and $100 billion over the course of the next two or three years...We're dealing with a country that can really finance its own reconstruction, and relatively soon.
Saddam Hussein had nerve gas and used it against his own people, he had used chemical weapons against the Iranians and he almost had a nuclear bomb in 1981 and in 1991. And he had been caught with anthrax in 1995 by the UN inspections after denying that he had it.
Part of what is wrong with the view of American imperialism is that it is antithetical to our interests. We are better off when people are governing themselves. I'm sure there is some guy that will tell you that philosophy is no different from the Roman Empire's. Well, it is fundamentally different.
The Western alliance should have supported the Sunni opposition against the Assad regime from the beginning. As far as Iraq is concerned, if it had stayed stable the way it was in 2008, IS would not have been able to expand in Iraq the way they did. The mistake was that Barack Obama withdrew the armed forces from Iraq too fast.
I have always had a tendency to keep enlarging problems which I personally think is the way the world works... that seeing anything one dimensionally on the kinds of political, sort of big issues of human progress is going to be a distorted view of things, which is why over my career I have gone seemingly from subject to subject to subject.
It would be a huge mistake to abandon democracy promotion. Peaceful political change has been enormously successful in the past years in Eastern European countries as well as in countries like South Korea, South Africa, Chile and Indonesia. However, if possible, the use of force is something to avoid except in cases where genocide is threatened, like Bosnia or Libya or with regimes that threaten our security, like the Taliban and Saddam Hussein.
I don't know of a single instance of these Arab freedom fighters holding up pictures of bin Laden. I know many instances of them displaying American flags in Benghazi or painting 'Facebook' on their foreheads in Cairo. The idea of freedom . . . is absolutely contradictory to what bin Laden stood for, which was . . . taking Muslims back to some medieval theocracy and encouraging people to die not for freedom but to go to paradise and to kill innocent people along the way. The contrast is really striking.
There has been a good deal of comment — some of it quite outlandish — about what our postwar requirements might be in Iraq. Some of the higher end predictions we have been hearing recently, such as the notion that it will take several hundred thousand U.S. troops to provide stability in post- Iraq, are wildly off the mark. It is 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.