Karl Rove Quotes

To win that war [with radical Islamic extremists] we need a commander-in-chief, not a professor of law standing at the lectern.

Once we got hit by - on 9/11 and lost 3,000 people that day, we recognized, and it was one of the key decisions President Bush made, that this is not a law enforcement problem, it is a strategic threat to the United States. It's a war. And based on that, we then adopted a whole set of policies that flowed out of that proposition.

Now that Washington once again has a tangible adversary -- variously described as ‘freedom-hating terrorists,’ ‘Salafist jihadis,’ or ‘Islamofascists’ -- U.S. leaders have convinced the American public that foreign policy is an ‘us-versus-them’ contact sport in which the primary tactics are military and coercive

We had eight years of Barack Obama depleting our military, ignoring a lot of the threats around the world.

And above all, what does being liberal have to do with opposing, or, uh, supporting the war against terror? Our enemies in the war against terror are so anti-liberal that you would think it would be liberals leaping to protect the world from these monstrous ideologies.

Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump basically share a policy of brute military strength. And both, I think, make a lot of Americans uneasy about our foreign policy going forward, which needs a frank discussion. Likewise on the issue of student debt and the future of our younger generation.

Now this brings me to my main topic - our military strength - more specifically, how to stay strong against threat from outside, without undermining the economic health that supports our security.

The biggest budget is the military budget. For what? We're fighting two wars in very small countries that have no nuclear weapons, that have no capabilities to destroy anything. They probably couldn't even get to America.

I happen to be one of those in the antiwar part of things who actually supported Bill Clinton when he sent the cruise missiles in to take out bin Laden. I had thought we had the right to use Special Forces to go in for bin Laden. He had attacked American embassies. He attacked ships. And so, I didn't see any need to coddle the Taliban.

In America, we believe in peace through strength, and that's what we will have.

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.

We will strengthen our security by building missile defense, restoring our military might, and standing by and strengthening our intelligence officers.

The most fundamental purpose of government is defense, not empire.

In my fight against terrorism, to me, the biggest terrorist is Obama, and the United States of America.

War on terrorism defines the central preoccupation of the United States in the world today, and it does reflect in my view a rather narrow and extremist vision of foreign policy of the world's first superpower, of a great democracy, with genuinely idealistic traditions.

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.

What we have to stop and think about is that we have weakened ourselves militarily to such an extent that it affects all of our military policies.

Military preparedness is absolutely a form of strength.

We must maintain strong defenses, military and spiritual.

We can go to the American people on this issue of winning the war [against terrorism]. We can go to the country on this issue because they trust the Republican Party to do a better job of protecting and strengthening America's military might and thereby protecting America.

Our national aims can be realized only by military means. The matter needs no further elaboration or interpretation.

Our military is trained to kill our enemies in foreign lands, not to do civilian law enforcement within our country.

If the United States were attacked by rockets from one of our neighboring countries, we would be a lot tougher on them than Israel has been on the Palestinians. When we were attacked, we sent an army abroad and took over Afghanistan from the Taliban.

Fighting terrorists does not require half a trillion dollars worth of conventional and nuclear forces.

The Chinese military is on a different page from the Chinese civilian leadership.