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I have defended the interests of France at the G8 in Washington; afterwards I was at Chicago to announce the withdrawal of French troops from Afghanistan; I have participated in two European summits, so I have fully respected the engagements I made to the French.
One thing that bothers me is the way that people use veterans and troops almost as a shield. They say that's the reason they stand and that veterans deserve to be honored and respected during the anthem. But where is that outrage in taking better care of veterans?
Our soldiers have done a valiant effort in fighting terrorism and bringing a semblance of law and order to the chaos in the region and it would be shortsighted to lay out a specific timetable to bring U.S. troops home prematurely before their mission is accomplished.
Now, in this U.N. stuff, the commander, although he has troops, they don't really belong to him. They're loaned by the country to the U.N. to be used, but each of these countries provide a contingent commander, a senior guy who communicates directly back to his capital.
One of the extraordinary features of the Blair government has been its slavish support for the central tenets of Bush's foreign policy - above all, the war in Iraq. During the Cold War, the Wilson government resisted the suggestion that it should send troops to Vietnam.
In the event of fire in any of the public buildings troops would be of vast service in the protection of public property, and should insurrection break out the protection of life and property would be more safe guarded by our company of regulars, than by the whole City.
Do we want an Attorney General who will play politics with the law, play politics with the court and just play politics with international conventions designed to protect our troops? I do not want to play that kind of politics. I am going to vote against Alberto Gonzales.
President George H.W. Bush was a patriot who served our country in World War II, lead the CIA, an Ambassador to the United Nations, was the Vice President and the Commander and Chief who oversaw the end of the Cold War and successfully led our troops through the Gulf War.
Simon Bolivar turned over all of his land. He freed all of his slaves, and he turned them into soldiers, and he brought them here. He brought them to Peru and Carabobo, and he worked together with the troops of San Martin to liberate this continent. That is Simon Bolivar.
Wrestling is maybe 10 percent of our job. Everything else is what we do outside the ring and that's really rewarding. I got to go to Afghanistan to visit the troops, work with Special Olympics, it's just one of those jobs that's once in a lifetime and we're lucky to do it.
Has there ever been a more revealing moment this year? Let me just put this in fairly simple terms: Al Jazeera now broadcasts the words of Senator Durbin to the Mideast, certainly putting our troops in greater danger. No more needs to be said about the motives of liberals.
During a few days' halt near Vesontio for the provision of corn and other supplies, a panic arose from inquiries made by our troops and remarks uttered by Gauls and traders, who affirmed that the Germans were men of a mighty frame and an incredible valour and skill at arms.
The National Guard has served America as both a wartime force and the first military responders in times of domestic crisis. Hundreds of times each year, the nation's governors call upon their Guard troops to respond to fires, floods, hurricanes and other natural disasters.
At the beginning, Lincoln was so inexperienced he had reverence for military expertise, not realizing that there wasn't any military expertise, that the most anybody had commanded up to that point had been somebody, some troops in the Mexican War, and it had been years ago.
Launching a ground war against Iran would require hundreds of thousands of troops for a 'regime change followed by nation-building' operation, as we attempted in Iraq. Iran has a much more modern military, more than double Iraq's population, and almost four times the landmass.
Iran has basically propped up Assad, who has waged an absolute war of horror against the Syrian people. And he has done anything he could to stay in power with the full support of the Iranians and including Iranian troops and Hezbollah from Lebanon, which are an Iranian proxy.
It's all rot that they put in the war-news about the good humour of the troops, how they are arranging dances almost before they are out of the front-line. We don't act like that because we are in a good humour: we are in a good humour because otherwise we should go to pieces.
The United States encouraged Iraqis to rise up after Saddam Hussein's army was driven out of Kuwait. Washington assumed Saddam was weak after losing the 1991 Gulf War. Iraqis rose up, but Saddam's troops killed thousands - Iraqis say tens of thousands - in a counter-offensive.
In Afghanistan, there is a plan to build democracy; hundreds of thousands of troops are protecting it. There is a plan to rebuild and reconstruct there. But many thousands of Americans die from violence and poverty every year and we don't have a plan for reconstruction at home.
Let's be under no illusions: There are attacks on, for example, transgender Americans from the Oval Office, picking on troops - people willing to lay down their lives for this country - not to mention teenagers in our high schools. So we've got to end the war on trans Americans.
A tale is told of a man in Paris during the upheaval in 1948, who saw a friend marching after a crowd toward the barricades. Warning him that these could not be held against the troops, that he had better keep way, he received this reply, " I must follow them. I am their leader."
Anger is precious. A silverback uses anger to maintain order and warn his troops of danger. When my father beat his chest, it was to say, Beware, listen, I am in charge. I am angry to protect you, because that is what I was born to do. Here in my domain there is no one to protect.
The attack on the transgender troops - disgusting, disgraceful, outrageous. It's just endless. And then you try to do your day job of finding good bipartisan work across the aisle... You're doing both all the time. I guess I would describe it as intense. Everything is very intense.
During a time of war, we ask our troops to give their best even to the point of sacrificing their own lives. When compared against that, how much of a sacrifice is it for a president to engage in a possibly contentious debate with Congress about whether military action is a good idea?
The PGA Tour has a lot of interaction with our military, and I've grown to have an incredible respect for our troops who are coming home with these horrific injuries, as well as any organization that can not only help them get healed up, but help them get integrated back into society.
Certainly we must combine forces . South African troops are within the country.We raised this matter with Mrs [Margaret] Thatcher and Lord [Peter] Carrington when we met them and we wanted to get from them a definite commitment that they were going to get the South African troops out.
In my generation, thankfully, as somebody who served in the Afghanistan War, would have served in the Iraq War, if called to do so - was also strongly against the Iraq War, from the beginning - I'm so thankful that we live in a moment that we can honor the troops separately from policy.
In the past, rulers led their troops into battle and, even in peacetime, called themselves fathers of their people. And modern politics retains abundant masculine rituals. Prime minister's question time in Britain, for instance, is a stylised duel and tournament redolent of testosterone.
Lincoln made mistakes. Roosevelt made mistakes. Eisenhower made mistakes. The Battle of the Bulge was the biggest intelligence failure in American military history, much bigger than any in Vietnam or now. We didn't know that the Soviets were moving 400,000 or 500,000 troops. We missed it.
The War Powers Act requires presidents to seek the consent of the American people, through their representatives, before sending our troops into war. It is the responsibility of Congress to deliberate and consult with the executive branch before involving ourselves in a military conflict.
We now have only 31 brigade combat teams or 490,000 troops. And only one-third of combat teams are considered combat-ready. That's not good for our country. I actually don't even like saying it because plenty of countries are watching us right now, but we'll get it shaped up very quickly.
A lot of what a military officer does is not just leading troops in combat. It's also doing budgets. It's solving complex problems. If you can sit down with warlords, you can certainly sit down with different parties and folks with different interests and come out with an amenable solution.
The sitting prime minister, Jose Aznar, who had strongly backed the U.S.-led Iraq War, was unseated by a challenger who then pulled Spanish troops out of Iraq. The Madrid terrorist attacks are generally regarded as being the key to why Aznar, who had been leading in the polls, was defeated.
I saw the president make the tough calls in the Situation Room - and today, our troops in Iraq have finally come home so America can do some nation building here at home. That was the change that we believed in. That was the change we fought for. That was the change President Obama delivered.
I went to Vietnam during the Vietnam War to visit all the troops. We would fly into a hospital and serve mess to the guys, and we ate whatever they were eating. Then we slept there and flew out the next day to little bases where there were maybe 10 or 20 guys. Then we flew to another hospital.
The pomp, power, and military bombast of 'La Marseillaise' draws me into the history of France and my own. The surname I was born with was French: D'Orsay; perhaps an ancestor was amongst those troops that marched to this evocative anthem for the first time as they entered Paris 200 years ago!
Al-Qa'ida does not follow a traditional command structure, wear uniforms, carry its arms openly, or mass its troops at the borders of the nations it attacks. Nonetheless, it possesses the demonstrated capability to strike with little notice and cause significant civilian or military casualties.
In the 1950s, the black men and women and their white allies who fought for civil rights and basic human dignity could look to the federal government. If the racist sheriff and his troops beat them with batons or sprayed them and their children with water cannons, the attorney general would act.
The best way to honor our troops, the less than 1% of our country's population who voluntarily put their lives on the line in service to our country, is by making sure that when they are sent into combat, it is the last option, not the first, and that the mission is worthy of their great sacrifice.
Truman fired the popular Gen. Douglas MacArthur because he disobeyed orders in the Korean War. Johnson knew that he had reached the endgame in Vietnam when Gen. William Westmoreland, the top commander in Vietnam, requested 240,000 more troops in 1968 for the prolonged war that also could not be won.
I said in October of 2008 that there was no proof that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction or had the intention or capability of attacking the United States. Here we are. Almost 4,700 troops died, tens of thousands injured, over a million Iraqis dead. It will cost $5 trillion in the end for the war.
I think that now that we are seeing multimedia types of productions with videos and pictures and human beings performing the acts that animals used to perform, such as in Cirque du Soleil and other traveling troops, there is no need to parade animals around anymore in cages for personal gratification.
The idea that women are innately gentle is a fantasy, and a historically recent one. Kali, the Hindu goddess of destruction, is depicted as wreathed in male human skulls; the cruel entertainments of the Romans drew audiences as female as they were male; Boudicca led her British troops bloodily into battle.
You have to understand the Newark Riots - a lot of people understand that the pain was the initial explosion of anger and alienation, but after that, the response, sending the National Guard troops - a lot of violence was carried out and perpetrated by those who were allegedly coming here to protect residents.
When I'm hard at work, when I'm deep in it, there is no other feeling. For me, my work is at all times building a nation out of thin air. It is manning the troops. It is painting a canvas. It is hitting every high note. It is running a marathon. It is being Beyonce. And it is all of those things at the same time.
I worked for the troops my entire time in the United States Armed Forces because we know in the United States Armed Forces that it's not the generals and the colonels that win battles, it's the soldiers: it's the people at the front, the mechanics with their wrenches, the drivers moving the logistics back in the rear.
Should President Clinton have killed Osama bin Laden when he had the opportunity in 1990s? Should President Bush have sent the U.S. military into Iraq to depose Saddam Hussein in 2003? Should President Obama have withdrawn all troops from Iraq in 2011? Such questions provide no real insight into future considerations.
And across Afghanistan, every single day, Afghan soldiers, Afghan police and ISAF troops are serving shoulder-to-shoulder in some very difficult situations. And our engagement with them, our shoulder-to-shoulder relationship with them, our conduct of operations with them every single day defines the real relationship.
President George H. W. Bush soon launched Operation Desert Shield, sending an enormous contingent of troops to Saudi Arabia. But once there, what exactly were they to do? Contain Iraq? Attack and liberate Kuwait? Drive on to Baghdad and depose Saddam? There was no clear consensus among foreign policy advisers or analysts.
I've always disliked kamikazes, that is, people who commit suicide in order to kill others. Starting with the Japanese ones from World War II. I never considered them Pietro Miccas who torch the powder and go up with the citadel in order to block the arrival of the enemy troops at Torino. I never considered them soldiers.