Julian Dale Alford Quotes

We're not going to spread democracy at the business end of a M16 held by a 23 year old Marine.

There should be victory in war—not management.

Nor should the U.S. military be forced to remain in Iraq essentially as an army for one side of a civil war.

When you’re fighting [private] militias, you have to quash them.

The United States Army had become reliant on firepower and technological superiority in its history of annihilating enemy forces...The concept that success in counterinsurgency consisted of separating the insurgents from popular support never took hold. The U.S. Army proceeded with its historical role of destroying the enemy army –p even if it had a hard time finding it.

In 2 wars [Afghanistan and Iraq] victory seemed to be measured not in terms of when the United States would prevail, but by when it would be able to leave.

The initial [Iraq] war was won in about 6 weeks, but the peace was lost soon thereafter.

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.

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.

Faced with the collapse of Iraq into something like Lebanon - or worse, Somalia - the Bush administration opted for a new counterinsurgency strategy. Violence was reduced because, for the first time since the U.S. invaded Iraq in 2003, Iraqis felt that there was a force capable of dominating the situation and ensuring basic order.

Afghanistan and Iraq were lumped together in what was called a 'global war on terrorism.'

Three years into the war, tens of thousands of American troops remain targets of a growing Iraqi insurgency.

The main reason for the armed resistance is the American military presence.

The presence of American troops is fueling the insurgency in Iraq, as acknowledged by General Casey and numerous other experts, and is helping terrorist recruiters build their numbers across the globe.

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'.

The U.S. spent billions of dollars to build a secular, professional national Iraqi army but failed because, despite all the U.S.-supplied guns, tanks and planes, the Iraqi military fell apart when challenged by a band of terrorists.

American failures in Vietnam and Iraq suggest that it's not really possible to create and sustain a proxy government in a country far from our own borders.

... even political opponents of evil governments show little gratitude for American invasion to modernize them..

There are two things that will always be difficult for a democratic people to do: to start a war and to finish it

A U.S. invasion of Iraq could turn the whole region into a cauldron, and thus destroy the war on terrorism. A military campaign very likely would have to be followed by a large-scale, long-term military occupation.

We have to go in and win this war quickly, and then be prepared to help stabilize Iraq over an indefinite period, five to ten years, at a minimum, I believe, using a large fraction of American forces. This is a major undertaking that likely would require a total of 150,000 troops and could stay above 100,000 for several years

The U.S. military will be stepping into a morass. Iraq presents as unpromising a breeding ground for democracy as any in the world. It has never really known democracy or even legitimate, centralized rule for any great duration.

Someone should tell the president that U.S. forces would need to be in Iraq for two to five years, and they will not have an easy time there.

Thinking about the war now and the occupation later is not an acceptable solution.

I would hope that we have in place the adequate resources to become an army of occupation because you’re going to walk into chaos