Madeleine Albright Quotes

The Middle East is more angry than ever. I'm afraid that the sort of deceit on the route to war was linked to the lack of preparation for afterwards and the chaos and suffering that continuous - so it won't go away will it?

We, Britain and Germany, can neither of us be happy about our handling of the Iraq war.

Several experts on the Middle East concur that the Middle East cannot be democratized.

If the Iraqis fail to implement the reforms, if they fail to get a handle on the violence, there's nothing the United States can do, militarily or otherwise, that can solve those problems. They have to assume the primary responsibility to govern themselves.

Those of us who actually were working in the region at the time will point out how strongly committed we were to supporting the democratic process and encouraging elections, in spite of the fact that a war was going on in several of these countries.

I'm just very wary that once you start military operations in any country, it's very difficult to predict what the outcome is.

We can't have a failure in Iraq, but we also can't be there for the next 10 years because if we are, it's going to become, I think, a failure in and of itself.

The mistake that was made was, of course, leaving Saddam in charge of affairs over there.

The U.S. cannot impose freedom, security, and unity in Iraq by force.

We should be proud of liberating the 26 million people in Iraq and should remember that this is why it is important to stick it out to it's successful conclusion.

I believe very deeply in the proposition that what we did in Iraq was the right thing to do. It was hard to do. It took a long time. There were significant costs involved.

We must win in Iraq. If we withdraw, there will be chaos; there will be genocide; and they will follow us home.

We are not in Afghanistan for the sake of the education policy in a broken 13th-century country. We are there so the people of Britain and our global interests are not threatened.

Support for peaceful reform by the people themselves is the right way to promote democracy, not the use of force.

Anybody who believes that we can democratize Iran, Iraq and Syria by military force is living in a fantasy world.

I have no doubt that our military would decisively defeat Iraq’s forces and remove Saddam. But like the proverbial dog chasing the car down the road, we must consider what we would do after we caught it. I am especially worried about the extreme difficulty of occupying Iraq with its history of autocratic rule, its balkanized ethnic tensions, and its isolated economic system. Our regime might be rejected by the Iraqi people, leading to civil unrest and even anarchy.

It is overly optimistic to think that we can take a country that has emerged from under a totalitarian regime with its institutions of civil society and create a beacon of democracy within five years. If we try to transform Iraq into a democracy, we will need more and more troops over time because we will have to quell nationalistic revolts.

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.

History will judge the war against Iraq not by the brilliance of its military execution, but by the effectiveness of the post-hostilities activities

As to Korea, there is no longer any real hope of a genuinely peaceful and free democratic development in that country. Its political life in the coming period is bound to be dominated by political immaturity and violence. Where such conditions prevail, the communists are in their element. Therefore, we cannot count on native Korean forces to help us hold the line against Soviet expansion

The occupation of Iraq is completely self-perpetuating: The worse things get the more we are obliged to stay. And the longer we stay the worse things get.

A much better course would be a gradual development of democracy, not through general elections, but rather through civil society and the strengthening of local institutions.

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

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

The U.S. couldn't even get rid of Saddam Hussein. And we all know that the EU is just a passing fad. They'll be killing each other again in less than a year. I'm sick to death of all these fascist lawsuits.