Daniel Akaka Quotes

I voted no on the resolution to give the president authority to go to war against Iraq. I was able to apply caveat emptor. Most of my colleagues could not.

Our opponent and many in Congress criticized our decision to end the Iraq war.

Woe to the statesman whose reason for entering a war do not appear so plausible at its end as at its beginning.

By invading Iraq, the President has undermined the War on Terrorism.

By Rice's own standards, the war was well underway by the time he took office. He was a war president the moment he took the oath. But did he act like one?

There are two things which a democratic people will always find very difficult - to begin a war and to end it.

Today, war of necessity is used by critics of military action to describe unavoidable response to an attack like that on Pearl Harbor that led to our prompt, official declaration of war, while they characterize as unwise wars of choice the wars in Korea, Vietnam and the current war in Iraq.

The war in Iraq has as much to do with terrorism as the administration has to do with compassion.

When the commander-in-chief sends Americans to fight and die, it should be only to protect our vital national interests, not for his own personal, political gain.

There are a lot of things that have to be considered in National. The military aspect of it is only one of them. I'm confident that President Bush will have all of those things laid out for him before he makes the decision.

The decision to go to war is the most important decision that I can make as a representative in Congress. As a veteran, I see any potential military action first through the eyes of the young men and women who volunteered to wear the uniform and would carry out such a mission.

I think in national security, the war in Iraq is troublesome and a difficult challenge, but our troops and the military leaders we have are managing that situation, although it continues to be very risky and very dangerous.

I support the current operational position and tactics in Iraq, but we’re in a bad place, we didn’t need to be there, and we shouldn’t do it again.

I don't recall anyone who was strongly against except one man, and that was the President [JFK]. The President just didn't want to be convinced that this was the right thing to do.... It was really the President's personal conviction that U.S. ground troops shouldn't go in.

Unlike Hillary Clinton, who voted for the war without knowing what she was doing, I would not have had our people in Iraq. Iraq was disaster.

This war is being played in the realm of public opinion and has dire consequences for our soldiers in Iraq, the future of our country, and freedom around the world.

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

War is much too serious a thing to be left to military men.

I said it was my feeling that the American people would struggle for peace, and that has since been underscored by the President of these United States.

The war in Iraq has been extremely divisive here at home, and has also divided the world community.

War should be the politics of last resort. And when we go to war, we should have a purpose that our people understand and support.

So a truthful assessment of how America is doing in the war on terror as a result of President Bush's war on Iraq is that we have been set back by decades.

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.

What I've learned, and will try to remember from now on, is that defending your country's credibility is never sufficient reason to fight a war.

I may be wrong in that, but not I think in putting the questions. In our modern democracy the government needs not a unanimous but a general support for war before it orders our forces to fight.