Mike Thompson Quotes

Before our kids start coming home from Iraq in body bags and women and children start dying in Baghdad, I need to know, what did Iraq do to us?

Vote for war allowed war only after all else failed.

In 2005, I was the first member of Congress to introduce legislation calling for an immediate withdrawal of our troops from Iraq.

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.

Politicians do not enter into wars lightly. It is usually the military themselves who are keener to become involved.

Voting against the resolution authorizing the use of military force in Iraq was one of my proudest moments as a senator. It is long past time to close this tragic chapter in American history.

I'd like to see a more aggressive attitude on the part of the United States. That doesn't mean launching an immediate preventive war.

Little Bush says we are at war, but we are not at war because to be at war Congress has to vote for it. He says we are at war on terror, but that is a metaphor, though I doubt if he knows what that means. It's like having a war on dandruff, it's endless and pointless.

I will not vote to send my sons, or your sons, daughters, brothers, sisters or friends to fight for a stalemate.

I just can't vote to go to war unless I think there's a real clear-cut American purpose in the war, that we're going to win and that we're not going fight for stalemate.

[To the House of Representatives before casting the only vote against allowing George W. Bush to use 'all necesary and appropriate force' in response to 9/11:] We must be careful not to embark on an open-ended war with neither an exit strategy nor a focused target. We cannot repeat past mistakes.

I voted to send people to war.

No president can easily commit our sons and daughters to war.

I think the President ought to bring everybody that's in American uniform back because we're headed for war.

I came from the South and I know what war is, for I have seen its wreckage and terrible ruin. It is easy for me as President to declare war. I do not have to fight, and neither do the gentlemen on the Hill who now clamour for it. It is some poor farmer's boy, or son of some poor widow away off in some modest community, or perhaps the scion of a great family, who will have to do the fighting.

A serious pacifist approach can't win wars against enemies whose only program is violence. That doesn't mean I think the US has fought terrorists so wisely most of the time since 9/11. But there are some enemies that need to be destroyed by force lest they destroy much much more.

I often think it would be really interesting to take all of those who would wage war to the battlefield cemeteries, and say, explain yourself to the dead. Explain yourself to the dead!

Now that Obama is at war in a 3rd country, does that mean he has to give back his Nobel Peace Prize?

John McCain is the guy that has advocated for war everywhere. He would bankrupt the nation.

War may make a fool of man, but it by no means degrades him; on the contrary, it tends to exalt him, and its net effects are much like those of motherhood on women.

I know war as few other men now living know it, and nothing to me is more revolting. I have long advocated its complete abolition, as its very destructiveness on both friend and foe has rendered it useless as a means of settling international disputes... But once war is forced upon us, there is no other alternative than to apply every available means to bring it to a swift end.

What we did in Iraq was exactly the right thing to do. If I had it to recommend all over again, I would recommend exactly the same course of action.

We have discovered that the scheme of 'outlawing war' has made war more like an outlaw without making it less frequent and that to banish the knight does not alleviate the suffering of the peasant.

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.

If the choice is go to war or end up with an American city hit by weapon of mass destruction, then the choice is easy.