Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
The Sunni Arabs began to realize that they had made a huge mistake by not voting in the election of 2005 and by not being part of the new Iraq. They had reasons for this: They were effected by the disestablishment of the military and by de-Baathification (the dismantling of Saddam Hussein's party) in winter 2007-2007. They increasingly recognized that their future lay in being part of the solution rather than a continuing part of the problem.
Do you know what Agelisas said, when he was asked why the great city of Lacedomonie was not girded with walls? Because, pointing out the inhabitants and citizens of the city, so expert in military discipline and so strong and well armed: "Here," he said, "are the walls of the city," meaning that there is no wall but of bones, and that towns and cities can have no more secure nor stronger wall than the virtue of their citizens and inhabitants.
An essential part of any successful action on the part of the United States is an understanding on the part of the people of America of the character of the problem and the remedies to be applied. ... It is virtually impossible at this distance merely by reading, or listening, or even seeing photographs or motion pictures, to grasp at all the real significance of the situation. And yet the whole world of the future hangs on a proper judgment.
In the various states of society, armies are recruited from very different motives. Barbarians are urged by the love of war; the citizens of a free republic may be prompted by a principle of duty; the subjects, or at least the nobles, of a monarchy, are animated by a sentiment of honor; but the timid and luxurious inhabitants of a declining empire must be allured into the service by the hopes of profit, or compelled by the dread of punishment.
American airstrikes...create risks, especially if our intelligence there is rusty. The crucial step, and the one we should apply diplomatic pressure to try to achieve, is for Maliki to step back and share power with Sunnis while accepting decentralization of government. If Maliki does all that, it may still be possible to save Iraq. Without that, airstrikes would be a further waste in a land in which we've already squandered far, far too much.
It is a damned sight easier to start wars than to end them. This truth has been stated for as long and as often as it has been ignored. High time and thank God, we are at least moving toward de-escalation in Vietnam. The road to extrication will be long, painful, bitter. But it must be trod. We are so bogged down in Vietnam that we cannot respond effectively anywhere else in the world to a military power play except through atomic bombardment.
Many opportunities have been lost and hundreds of valuable lives uselessly sacrificed for want of a strict observance of discipline. Its object is to enable an army to bring promptly into action the largest possible number of its men, in good order and under the control of their officers. Its effects are visible in all military history, which records the triumphs of discipline and courage far more frequently than those of numbers and resources.
If we wish to be free; if we mean to preserve inviolate those inestimable privileges for which we have been so long contending; if we mean not basely to abandon the noble struggle in which we have been so long engaged, and which we have pledged ourselves never to abandon until the glorious object of our contest shall be obtained - we must fight! I repeat it, sir, we must fight! An appeal to arms, and to the God of hosts, is all that is left us.
Today, we are tabling a motion seeking the support of the House for the Government's decision to renew our military mission against ISIL for up to an additional 12 months. Our objectives remain the same: we intend to continue to degrade the capabilities of ISIL, that is, to degrade its ability to engage in military movements of scale, to operate bases in the open, to expand its presence in the region, and to propagate attacks outside the region.
In the weakness of one kind of authority, and in the fluctuation of all, the officers of an army will remain for some time mutinous and full of faction, until some popular general, who understands the art of conciliating the soldiery, and who possesses the true spirit of command, shall draw the eyes of all men upon himself. Armies will obey him on his personal account. There is no other way of securing military obedience in this state of things.
Marines have a cynical approach to war. They believe in three things; liberty, payday and that when two Marines are together in a fight, one is being wasted. Being a minority group militarily, they are proud and sensitive in their dealings with other military organizations. A Marine's concept of a perfect battle is to have other Marines on the right and left flanks, Marine aircraft overhead and Marine artillery and naval gunfire backing them up.
The population becomes the internal enemy. Any sign of life, of protest, or even mere doubt, is a dangerous challenge from the standpoint of military doctrine and national security. So complicated mechanisms of prevention adn punishment have been developed ... To operate effectively, the repression must appear arbitrary. Apart from breathing, any human activity can constitute a crime ... State terrorism aims to paralyze the population with fear.
President Vladimir Putin continues to call for new peace plans as his troops roll through the Ukrainian countryside and he absolutely ignores every agreement that his country has signed in the past and he has signed recently, we, the United States, and Europe as a whole, have to stand with Ukraine at this moment. Ukraine needs our financial assistance and support as it pursues reforms and even in the face, in the face of this military onslaught.
Our government has kept us in a perpetual state of fear - kept us in a continuous stampede of patriotic fervor - with the cry of grave national emergency. Always there has been some terrible evil at home or some monstrous foreign power that was going to gobble us up if we did not blindly rally behind it by furnishing the exorbitant funds demanded. Yet, in retrospect, these disasters seem never to have happened, seem never to have been quite real.
Men, age 25 to 55, the labor-force participation rate is down 10%. That's unbelievable. There are 35,000 dying of opioids every year. Seventy percent of kids age 17 to 24 can't get into the US military because of health or education. Obesity, diabetes, reading and writing. Is that the society we wanted? No. We should be working on these things, acknowledge the flaws we have, and come up with solutions. Not Democrat. Not Republican. Not knee-jerk.
Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. This is not a way of life at all in any true sense. Under the clouds of war, it is humanity hanging on a cross of iron.
Do you really think you'd win a PR war against a bunch of committed librarians?' He thought about this, but he knew I was right. The libraries were a treasured institution and so central to everyday life that government and commerce rarely did anything that might upset them.Some say they were more powerful than the military, or, if not, they were certainly quieter. As they say: Don't mess with librarians. Only they use a stronger word than 'mess'.
Since my election to Congress, I've always been interested in human rights. I really do believe that's America's strength. Yes, we have a strong military; yes, we have a strong economy. But what really makes America the unique nation it is, is that we speak up about human rights, and anti-corruption, and good governance, and democratic institutions. That's what America is known for. That's what inspires people around the world with U.S. leadership.
Spies cannot be usefully employed without a certain intuitive sagacity; They cannot be properly managed without benevolence and straightforwardness; Without subtle ingenuity of mind, one cannot make certain of the truth of their reports; Be subtle! be subtle! and use your spies for every kind of warfare; If a secret piece of news is divulged by a spy before the time is ripe, he must be put to death together with the man to whom the secret was told.
The Bush administration has created an unimaginable catastrophe in Iraq. This should've been one of the easiest military occupations in history and they succeeded in turning it into one of the worst military disasters in history. They can't control it and it's almost impossible for them to get out for reasons you can't discuss in the United States because to discuss the reasons why they can't get out would be to concede the reasons why they invaded.
Imperialism creates the illusion of wealth as far as the masses are concerned. It usually serves to hide the fact that the ruling classes are gobbling up the natural resources of the home territory in an improvident manner and are otherwise utilizing the national wealth largely for their own purposes. Eventually the general public is called upon to pay for all of this, frequently after the military machine can no longer maintain external aggression.
I worked with the Nato Military Committee. The Head of the Luxembourg Armed Forces had equal standing with me, and I had to respect that. He was the leader of the armed forces of a sovereign country. I had to make sure he never thought that I was looking down on them, merely because they had less power than we did. With that kind of approach you can develop bonds of trust. I tried to do the same thing with my colleagues when I was Secretary of State.
There has been considerable comment over the awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize to a soldier. I am afraid this does not seem as remarkable to me as it quite evidently appears to others. I know a great deal of the horrors and tragedies of war. ... The cost of war in human lives is constantly spread before me, written neatly in many ledgers whose columns are gravestones. I am deeply moved to find some means or method of avoiding another calamity of war.
Civil libertarian activists are found overwhelmingly on the left. Their right-wing brethren have been concerned with issues more important than civil rights, voting rights, abuses by police and the military, and the subordination of politics to religion - issues like the campaign to expand human freedom by turning highways over to toll-extracting private corporations and the crusade to funnel money from Social Security to Wall Street brokerage firms.
The president Donald Trump, unlike previous administrations, has made a real commitment. That is the denuclearization of the peninsula is the mandate. That is what we are going to achieve. The president has made very clear that we're going to do everything we can to do that in a way that doesn't involve military action but has equally made clear that we're not going to stand for allowing Kim Jong-un to hold Los Angeles, or Denver, or New York at risk.
With overwhelming military strength now deployed against him and with intense monitoring from space surveillance and the U.N. inspection team on the ground, any belligerent move by Saddam against a neighbor would be suicidal....If Iraq does possess such concealed weapons, as is quite likely, Saddam would use them only in the most extreme circumstances, in the face of an invasion of Iraq, when all hope of avoiding the destruction of his regime is lost.
I am sorry to be so blunt, but I do not see much ambiguity here. [Barack] Obama was late to affirm the Egyptian revolution as a democratic movement, and even then he was eager to have installed those military leaders who were known for their practices of torture. And now he is quick to make allies with the Muslim Brotherhood for tactical reasons as well (though earlier that same administration stoked Islamophobic fear about that very political party).
Optimism is in short supply in the Middle East, but what I do think is the administration needs to step up its act. We should use military strikes against ISIS when they threaten the Shia areas or Baghdad. We need to accelerate very rapidly, and we have ways to do it, aid to the Syrians, and we need to be more active, with results, not simply inputs. That is absolutely important right now, because people are questioning our will, not our capabilities.
Communism is an aspiration, an aspiration is an ideal, a dream, a longing of something that would be perfect, but hard to build because it has to clash with human nature and against the egotism of humans and the egotism of the elites which usually try to guarantee their own interests above those of their nations and of their own people. But they are the ones that prevail because they have the economic power, the political power and the military power.
I offer a better way for America with ideas that actually work, a reformed tax code that rewards free enterprise instead of just enterprising lobbyists. A reformed health care system that operates by free choice instead of by force and doesn't leave you answering to cold, clueless bureaucrats. A commitment to a renewed commitment to building a 21st Century military and giving our veterans the care that they were promised and the care that they earned.
I have found there are real objects under in intelligent control being seen on the ground and in our skies worldwire. The unknowns have varied over the decades from 22 percent in my own civilian files, 30 percent in the University of Colorda Condon Committee scientific studies, to at least 40 percent recently revised found in the U.S. Air Force Project Blue Book military investigations. This is not acceptable, no matter who is doing the investigations.
I had a question. "Why does the name Pearl Harbor sound so familiar?" The lieutenant colonel's eyes narrowed. "Pearl Harbor is the most famous U.S. military base in the world," he said crisply. "It's the only place on U.S. soil that has been attacked in a wars, since the Revolutionary War." None of this was ringing a bell, but you already know I'm totally uneducated. Gazzy leaned over to whisper, "It was a movie with Ben Affleck." Ah. Now I remembered.
We fought a military war; our opponents fought a political one. We sought physical attrition; our opponents aimed for our psychological exhaustion. In the process we lost sight of one of the cardinal maxims of guerrilla war: the guerrilla wins if he does not lose. The conventional army loses if it does not win. The North Vietnamese used their armed forces the way a bull-fighter uses his cape to keep us lunging in areas of marginal political importance.
Every morning, I get up, get out of bed, and get on my knees and thank God for waking up in America ... (She is) the light of the world ... A nation of heroes ... The real stars are wearing body armor on top of their battle dress uniforms in 130 degree heat and they do not have stunt doubles to come in for them when the going gets rough and the bullets and the shrapnel start flying. They are the real stars, fighting terrorism and trying to free a nation.
Because I didn't see war in Iraq through the partisan lens that seems to dominate a lot of the perspective today with Fox News on the one side and MSNBC on the other, I didn't see it as Democrats good, Republicans bad. I saw it as a situation where the United States is a force that engages in these military operations around the world, and it's the job of journalists to provide the American people with information they can use to make informed decisions.
The military doesn't teach rifle marksmanship. It teaches equipment familiarity. Despite what the officer corps thinks, learning to shoot a rifle is not like learning to drive a car. Instead, it is like learning to play the violin.... The equipment familiarity learning curve comes up quick, but then the rifle marksmanship continuation of the curve rises very slowly....by shooting one careful shot at a time, carefully inspecting the result (and the cause).
With the increasingly important role of intelligent machines in all phases of our lives--military, medical, economic and financial, political--it is odd to keep reading articles with titles such as Whatever Happened to Artificial Intelligence? This is a phenomenon that Turing had predicted: that machine intelligence would become so pervasive, so comfortable, and so well integrated into our information-based economy that people would fail even to notice it.
In his 16 years in the Senate, John Kerry has fought against government waste and worked hard to bring some accountability to Washington. Early in his Senate career in 1986, John signed on to the Gramm-Rudman-Hollings Deficit Reduction Bill, and he fought for balanced budgets before it was considered politically correct for Democrats to do so. John has worked to strengthen our military, reform public education, boost the economy and protect the environment.
Suffice it to say that Wall Street investors in the drug industries have used the government to unleash and transform their economic power into political and global military might; never forget, America is not an opium or cocaine producing nation, and narcotic drugs are a strategic resource, upon which all of the above industries - including the military - depend. Controlling the world's drug supply, both legal and illegal, is a matter of national security.
Education has a tremendous power on man. Can't we see to which astonishing disciple the people of Sparte have submitted ("s'est plié", Fr.) for centuries, and this with a view to very petty purposes: purely outer greatness, the military predominace of Sparte. This example proves that man can everything on themselves when they want it ("peuvent tout sur eux-mêmes quand ils le veulent", Fr.); therefore it would only be a question of making them will the good.
In recent years, we've become enamored with our own past success. Lulled into complacency by the glitter of our own achievements. We've become accustomed to the title of Military Superpower, forgetting the qualities that got us there. We've become accustomed to our economic dominance in the world, forgetting that it wasn't reckless deals and get rich quick schemes that got us where we are, but hard work and smart ideas, quality products and wise investments.
The war against Russia is an important chapter in the German nation's struggle for existence. [...] The objective of this battle must be the demolition of present-day Russia and must therefore be conducted with unprecedented severity. Every military action must be guided in planning and execution by an iron resolution to exterminate the enemy remorselessly and totally. In particular, no adherents of the contemporary Russian Bolshevik system are to be spared.
They are wrong who think that politics is like an ocean voyage or a military campaign, something to be done with some particular end in view, something which leaves off as soon as that end is reached. It is not a public chore, to be got over with. It is a way of life. It is the life of a domesticated political and social creature who is born with a love for public life, with a desire for honor, with a feeling for his fellows; and it lasts as long as need be.
Many think it not only inevitable but entirely proper that liberty give way to security in times of national crisis--that, at the extremes of military exigency, inter arma silent leges. Whatever the general merits of the view that war silences law or modulates its voice, that view has no place in the interpretation and application of a Constitution designed precisely to confront war and, in a manner that accords with democratic principles, to accommodate it.
I do believe that the Kurds are in a difficult situation. They do have some American support. How consistent that will be is unclear. But they have built up a strong military, and they have begun to build the institutions of an autonomous life in Northern Syria. Turkey's enmity towards the Kurds and their desire to make sure there is no independent Kurdish state or even really autonomous enclave is going to push the Kurds into Bashar Assad's hands over time.
The university is a vast public utility which turns out future workers in today's vineyard, the military-industrial complex. They've got to be processed in the most efficient way to see to it that they have the fewest dissenting opinions, that they have just those characteristics which are wholly incompatible with being an intellectual. This is a real internal psychological contradiction. People have to suppress the very questions which reading books raises.
The environment in Canada is much more conducive to doing critical work, though Canada has its own set of problems, but nothing like those emerging in the United States. Unlike Penn State which was a huge recipient of Pentagon funds, and was hostile to any criticism of its connection to the military and intelligence services, McMaster is a very open university that takes its commitment to a quality education and function as a democratic sphere very seriously.
Nations are political and military entities, and so are blocs of nations. But it doesn't necessarily follow from this that they are also the basic, salient entities of economic life or that they are particularly useful for probing the mysteries of economic structure, the reasons for rise and decline of wealth. Indeed, the failure of national governments and blocs of nations to force economic life to do their bidding suggests some sort of essential irrelevance.
Finally it should be the earnest wish and paramount aim of the military administration to win the confidence, respect, and affection of the inhabitants of the Philippines by assuring them in every possible way that full measure of individual rights and liberties which is the heritage of free peoples, and by proving to them that the mission of the United States is one of benevolent assimilation substituting the mild sway of justice and right for arbitrary rule.
We know about General John Kelly's military experience and his record there and being a decorated veteran of combat over in Iraq in particular. In fact, that's where I first met him was when Ramadi was shot to shambles during the surge era. We took a ride around there, even a minaret was shot in half and he pointed to that and said we were taking fire from that minaret. My son took that down with a 20 milimeter cannon. That's my first impression of John Kelly.