Richard Armitage Quotes
Be prepared to be bombed. Be prepared to go back to the Stone Age.
The threat was if Pakistan did not cooperate with the United States after the September 11 attack. Pakistan was full of Islamic fundamentalists with strong ties to the Taliban and other terroristsw. Pakistan did cooperate as a government but the Musharraf government itself was under attack by the Islamic Fundamentalists who tried to assassinate Musharraf a number of times. Armitage has denied that he said such a thing, but he does admit a conversation where he told them that “they were with us or against us.”
The President was also getting ominous news from England. See {41111}
He was warning the majority and blaming them for what was to happen. Ironically, at the end of the First World War, Germany was so harshly treated because the allies felt that the Germans had been aforewarned not only by others but by opposition Germans as well.
He was the first man to see the experimental evidence of nuclear power and he realized that it had the potential for an incredibly powerful weapon. It was his message about the possibilities about the atomic bomb that Albert Einstein transmitted to FDR, leading to American development of the bomb.(See {624449}.) By the time the atomic bomb had been developed, Germany had surrendered and Szilard and others felt that there was no longer a need to beat the Germans to the development. So he went from the biggest enthusiast to the most serious opponent.
Richard Lee Armitage is an American former diplomat and government official. A graduate of the United States Naval Academy, Armitage served as a U.S. Navy officer in three combat tours of duty in the Vietnam War as a riverine warfare advisor. After leaving active duty, he served in a number of civil-service roles under Republican administrations. He worked as an aide to Senator Bob Dole before serving in various posts in the Defense Department and State Department.
