Barack Obama Quotes

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

At the same time I think it is absolutely necessary that there be no confusion, no misunderstanding that if the Iraqis.. do not comply, then there will be consequences and those consequences will involve the use of military force to disarm them through changing the regime.

The Iraq War is an incredibly strategic blunder of enormous proportions …. There was not an exit strategy because the people planning this war didn’t intend to leave.

Anyone who has ever studied the history of American diplomacy, especially military diplomacy, knows that you might start in a war with certain things on your mind as a purpose of what you are doing, but in the end, you found yourself fighting for entirely different things that you had never thought of before ... In other words, war has a momentum of its own and it carries you away from all thoughtful intentions when you get into it. Today, if we went into Iraq, like the president would like us to do, you know where you begin. You never know where you are going to end.

The only conflict that is worse than one that is intended is one that is unintended.

I think there are a number of issues that we should be addressing. I have put forth a plan to defeat ISIS.

There was in the House only one dissenting vote, from Barbara J. Lee, a Democrat from California, who warned that military action could not guarantee the safety of the country and that 'as we act, let us not become the evil we deplore.

If military action in Iraq is launched without a new U.N. resolution, Canada will not participate.

Some of the same self-certified smart people, who preached about mushroom clouds and weapons of mass destruction, are once again trying to stampede us into war. They seem to think only with their guns. To those who want to shoot first and ask questions later in Iraq, I join in a firm 'No!' We've been there and done that, and America is still paying for their past failure.

I cannot tell you how proud watching that [Iraqi] war coverage makes me. I know a lot of people are saying that they think that it's, that you know what we're doing is imperialistic. I watch the way we handle ourselves over there and I've never felt more patriotic in my life.

In America, every time we take rebels, whether it's in Iraq or anywhere else, we're arming people. And you know what happens? They end up being worse than the people.

I think I have great knowledge of - for military, and I think I have better vision for Syria than a lot of the so-called great military geniuses that are saying how to fight the war with Syria. In my opinion, they're doing just the opposite. Are we going to start World War III over Syria? Are we going to be there for the next 40 years?

The best power of all is to be free, but Obama is not a free person. He is a prisoner of a military system. He talked about closing Guantanamo and ending the war in Iraq. Now he's taken on another war. What's happening?

Moving into an unoccupied village when there's no opposition, I don't call that a military victory.

Let us recollect that peace or war will not always be left to our option; that however moderate or unambitious we may be, we cannot count upon the moderation, or hope to extinguish the ambition of others.

We cannot undo the past in this misguided war in Iraq.

We wanted this war and now we've got it, and I'm not sure that we know what to do with it.

As many people have chronicled, the decision to fight in Vietnam was a years-long accretion of step-by-step choices, each of which could be rationalized at the time. Invading Iraq was an unforced, unnecessary decision to risk everything on a 'war of choice' whose costs we are still paying.

The issue of what my role in the - in persuading the Bush administration to go to war has been greatly exaggerated.

First, we could have defied both of them and could have gone to war against both of these nations for this violation of international law and interference with our neutral rights.

Countries that intervene militarily rarely do so out of pure altruism.

It was essentially for self defence that we went to war in Afghanistan and would go to war in Iraq.

War is regarded as nothing but the continuation of state policy with other means.

Going to war against Iran - whether one calls such a move 'surgical' or 'total' - would be an extremely serious undertaking; with worldwide economic, military, diplomatic and human ramifications in both the short- and the long-term.

There are consequences if you act militarily, and there's big consequences if you don't act.