Bernie Sanders Quotes

When you decide to get involved in a military operation in a place like Syria, you've got to be prepared, as we learned from Iraq and Afghanistan, to become the government, and I'm not sure any country, either the United States or I don't hear of anyone else, who's willing to take on that responsibility.

Preemption, democracy promoting and nation building have all been sullied by association by association with the War in Iraq.

Foreign policy is painstakingly difficult, and if there is to be anything gained from the experience in Libya, it is how not to conduct world affairs.

You just hope that we haven't soured an entire generation on the necessity, from time to time, of using force because Iraq has been such a debacle. That would be tragic because Iran is a grave threat.

Everybody wants to disown neocon strategy, including the neocons, because that strategy never worked. Still, it was, in point of fact, a strategy. Nobody else has one.

Our safety at home and the cause of freedom abroad is largely contingent upon our success in Iraq.

Maybe we ought to consider a Golden Rule in foreign policy: Don't do to other nations what we don't want happening to us. We endlessly bomb these countries and then we wonder why they get upset with us?

You can't just drop the 82nd Airborne into Baghdad and it will all be over.

I don't believe Iran is a suicide state.

The international community unfortunately did take sides in Libya, and we would never allow the Security Council to authorise anything similar to what happened in Libya.

We have a model that we're following, and it's the Libya model.

We need somebody ready to be commander-in-chief on day one, who understands there are no moderates in Iran; they've been killed a long time ago.

Britain, along with the U.S.A., is war weary, and after the travesty of Iraq and Afghanistan, has grave misgivings in any future involvement in the Middle East. The ghost of Tony Blair and his single-minded determination to attack Iraq, at any cost, has cast a long shadow over British politics. The British public have a long collective memory.

It's not the job of the U.S. military to do nation-building or produce democratic utopias.

I just think everything we do has an unintended consequence. We take out Saddam Hussein in Iraq, and Iraq was the check against Iran.

If there is one lesson for U.S. foreign policy from the past 10 years, it is surely that military intervention can seem simple but is in fact a complex affair with the potential for unintended consequences.

Pat Roberts and I both feel very strongly that when we get to Iran, that we can't make the same mistakes. We have to ask the questions, the hard questions before, not afterwards, and get the right intelligence.

Very near the heart of all foreign affairs is the relationship between policy and military power.

I could have been very popular if I had launched a military attack on Iran but I chose patience.

The next time some neocon, demanding whatever military intervention neocons are demanding that day, invokes Hitler or Munich or appeasement, lock up your silver.

War should never be thought of as something autonomous, but always as an instrument of policy.

I fear German power less than I am beginning to fear is inactivity.

The world has nothing to fear from military ambition in our Government

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

Moscow believes that using force constitutes strategic defense.