Peter Bergen Quotes

President Kennedy was willing to go to war. He was not a coward. The man had been in war and so had Ken O'Donnell. He was ready to protect this nation, but he was not ready for a military solution just because it was being rammed down his throat.

Woe to the statesman whose reason for entering a war do not appear so plausible at its end as at its beginning.

Brainy folks were also present in Lyndon Johnson's administration, especially in the Pentagon, where Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara's brilliant 'whiz kids' tried to micro-manage the Vietnam war, with disastrous results.

This is not going to be decided by public opinion polls. It is a national security issue.

The Pentagon is always going to be the last to want to intervene. It is up to the civilians to tell us what they want to do and we’ll figure out how to do it.

To be a great president you have to have a war. All the great presidents had their wars.

The president refuses to say… refuses to say that the objective over there is victory.

The Mutual Security Act was intended not to fight a war but to prevent a war.

In Washington the semantics of the military muted the reality of war for the civilian policy-makers. In quiet, air-conditioned, thick-carpeted rooms, such terms as 'systematic pressure,' 'armed reconnaissance,' 'targets of opportunity,' and even 'body count' seemed to breed a sort of games-theory detachment.

I agree that obviously we cannot retreat from our position in Vietnam…. But we are going to have to muddle through for a while and see what we do.

The military people don't like it; the government probably doesn't like it, but the people should know what they're sending their young people into when they permit their governments to declare war and engage in war.

Like Lyndon Johnson, President Obama understands that timidity in a time of troubles is a prescription for failure.

It's not right to say that our loss in Vietnam turned out to be a gain. But lessons were learned. And they were the right lessons.

Domestic policy can only defeat us; foreign policy can kill us.

I was never able to convince myself that there was a cost-free alternative course, as from 1961, or that any of the different strategies since proposed, especially those involving stronger military action, would have made sense.

The President's speech suggested to me that were we to follow his leadership, we will be in Iraq not for months, but for years. I also hope I am wrong on this.

Let me remind you all that the first task of American foreign policy is to reduce threats to the United States.

Enemies are necessary for the wheels of the U.S. military machine to turn.

Our modern states are preparing for war without even knowing the future enemy.

So I think that our foreign policy, the president's strong and principled leadership when it comes to the war against terror and foreign policy is going to be an asset.

I'm going to vote in support of the president of the United States in keeping the troops in Iraq until the president and our military is convinced that the mission is complete.

Wars should be over in three days or less... and the American people must be all for it from the outset.

Many of the architects of the Vietnam War became near pariahs as they spent the remainder of their lives in the futile quest to explain away their decisions at the time.

I believe in a strong national defense. But it's my belief that neither Iraq nor Afghanistan poses a threat to national security, and we shouldn't be involved in either area.

So with the end of the Cold War, it became increasingly obvious that there was no basis upon which any decision was being made, not in the White House, and certainly because of that, not in the Congress.