James Blunt Quotes

When you are Commander in Chief, you should keep all your options on the table.

The biggest learning during my tenure as a captain was that, a lot of time, I used to think that this is common sense. But no, there is nothing called common sense.

Politics and war are remarkably similar situations.

The important thing is that we recognize our President's leadership, that he is not saying: I am going to walk away from this. He is saying: I am going to do the right thing.

President Bush has a track record of making the right decisions when it comes to national security.

War should be the only study of a prince. He should consider peace only as a breathing-time, which gives him leisure to contrive, and furnishes as ability to execute, military plans.

General Petraeus is not a miracle worker. He can not be successful unless the president creates greater confidence within his own team about the decisions which the president has himself made.

I've traveled with Jack Murtha to Iraq three times to learn more about the region, talk with our diplomats and military leaders, and meet with our troops. Those visits are the main reason that I opposed the War in Iraq since its inception.

I don't believe war is a way to solve problems. I think it's wrong. I don't have respect for the people that made the decisions to go on with war. I don't have that much respect for Bush. He's about war, I'm not about war - a lot of people aren't about war.

The biggest problem was the politicians knew nothing about fighting a war.

People do not make wars; governments do.

Early in my career, I sometimes found it difficult to make the tough people decisions - I had to learn that. In business, you want to listen. You want to learn. You want to make sure you're not proceeding without information. But if you wait too long, you can actually hurt an organization even more.

Fortunately, President Kennedy and Robert Kennedy disagreed with the estimate and chose a course of action less ambitious and aggressive than recommended by their advisers.

To sum up, the position we took was that since we didn't know the internal situation in Iraq nor Saddam Hussein, that our best bet was to take counsel from the people who did know him and who did deal with him.

So with the end of the Cold War, it became increasingly obvious that there was no basis upon which any decision was being made, not in the White House, and certainly because of that, not in the Congress.

Had Rumsfeld said at any time 'get me a report on what's going on', he could have had it. You're right, it depends on choices that we make, which parts of the world we want to be in immediate contact with.

And this system sorted out the Chechen war in just 20 days. This way, I used the President's power, he didn't use me. It wasn't hard for me to leave - it isn't my scene. I have nothing to do there.

It's up to Kim Jong Il to make that decision, and we can't make that for him.

I thought that the administration needed bipartisan support, and I was for our commander-in-chief. Because I felt at that time it was the right thing do. If I knew then what I know now, I would have never voted for the war.

Our vision of war is probably too influenced by the biggest one of all, World War II, where the forces of evil were so unambiguous and so relentless that there was no choice but to commit to total war and to demand unconditional surrender. Seldom, though, is it quite that clear cut.

War is often about making the least-worst decision. The same could be said about politics. But the stakes are higher in war, when the commander-in-chief is called upon to defend the nation.

That was my first lesson from Ben-Gurion. Then I saw him making peace, and I saw him making war. He mobilized me before the war. The man was a very rare combination between a real intellectual and a born leader. There is a contradiction between the two.

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.

Only the closest collaborators of the Fuehrer know how difficult is the burden of this responsibility; how sorrowful are the hours during which decisions must be made which bear upon the well being and the fate of all of Germany.

President Kennedy was willing to go to war. He was not a coward. The man had been in war and so had Ken O'Donnell. He was ready to protect this nation, but he was not ready for a military solution just because it was being rammed down his throat.