Michael Hastings Quotes

Now, I know there are many Americans who say, 'Get out of Afghanistan. Bring 'em all home.' And there are others who say, 'Put in hundreds of thousands of more.'

Afghanistan would have been difficult enough without Iraq. Iraq made it impossible. The argument that had we just focused on Afghanistan we'd now be okay is persuasive, but it omits the fact that we weren't supposed to get involved in nation-building in Afghanistan.In my new book, I open with a quote from Donald Rumsfeld. In October 2001, he said of Afghanistan: "It's not a quagmire." Ten years later there are 150,000 Western troops there.

The president made clear when he was a candidate for this office and when he took this office, that unfortunately prior to his taking office, because of the focus on Iraq, and the U.S. efforts there, that the original war, if you will, in Afghanistan had been neglected, the strategy there was unclear, and that it was not properly resourced.

I had said from the start that I thought Iraq was a mistake, that we should have stayed focused on Afghanistan. I think it was the right decision because the Taliban at that point had gotten a lot of momentum before I'd gotten into office, partly because we hadn't been paying attention as much as we needed to to Afghanistan.

With 300 Marines you could probably take over Iraq if you wanted to and get rid of ISIS completely.

It's very unlikely that we're going to send more troops to Iraq. We are going to have to train the Iraqis faster and harder.

The central thesis of the American failure in Afghanistan - the one you'll hear from politicians and pundits and even scholars - was succinctly propounded by Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage: 'The war in Iraq drained resources from Afghanistan before things were under control'.

I would be very careful about using our troops as nation builders. I believe the role of the military is to fight and win war and therefore prevent war from happening in the first place

I’d rather build highways here then try nation building in Iraq

Our military knows how to invade and conquer a country, but we do not know how to run one.

Can a foreign army, particularly with a vastly different culture, be a successful counterinsurgent?

I don’t think that we have ever had a coherent strategy on Iraq.

I watched the Bush administration overreact to the Clinton administration, who believed they did too much nation building, sustaining other countries, and that's why we never put the commitment on Afghanistan and Iraq that should have been in there under their policy leadership.

In 2011, General Alston, four-star commander in Iraq, recommended to the President, a force level of over 20,000. The President rejected it and pulled out all the forces with what is now known as a disastrous consequence in Syria.

I profoundly do not believe that the United States could make things better in Syria by being there. And we have an evidentiary record of what happens when we're there - nearly a decade in Iraq.

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.

I agree with the president [Barack Obama]. I've said myself, we will not send American combat troops back to either Syria or Iraq - that is off the table.

The mistakes of the Iraq war are not only tactical and strategic, but historical. It is essentially a war of colonialism, attempted in the post-colonial age.

It's very hard to understand just what our strategy is in Syria, frankly, and on Iraq that this is Iraq's war, that the role of the United States is to help Iraq, to arm, train, support, provide air support, but this has to be Iraq's war.

The major problem for America is we're losing two wars. We're losing in Afghanistan, we're losing in Iraq. And there seems very little likelihood that we're going to increase the number of troops we have in either place to the point that we can prevail.

No one is talking about occupying Iraq for five to ten years.

U.S. military action in Iraq: It sure didn't work out well last time. Let's not make that mistake again.

The big issue is whether the United States will succeed in its venture of reshaping the Middle East. It is not clear to me that using military force is the way to do it. We should not have gone into Iraq. But we have.

The kind of problem that America faces in Iraq is a little bit the kind of problem that Israel faced in dealing with Hezbollah. If the conflict, the theater of conflict enlarges, it's going to become more and more absorbing and more and more costly.

I believe that the president's (Bush) leadership in the actions taken in Iraq demonstrate an incompetence in terms of knowledge, judgment and experience in making the decisions that would have been necessary to truly accomplish the mission without the deaths to our troops and the cost to our taxpayers.