John Kasich Quotes

When Saddam Hussein's Iraqi forces invaded Kuwait in 1990, I felt America's post-Cold War commitment to national principles and international leadership was on the line. I was dismayed by the wide opposition among my fellow Democrats. To me, their position was wrong.

The president has largely taken a hands-off approach in Syria and granted it as a legitimate sphere of interest to countries like Iran and like Russia. This is very bad policy, and it's going to lead to very dangerous consequences for our partners in the region, which is why so many of them are so opposed to U.S. policies.

There is nowhere I encounter greater understanding for Israel's existential issues than in the Oval Office.

I believe he [Saddam Hussein] wants a better relationship with America.

I think [Bush] would like to hand his father Saddam Hussein's head and win his approval for what happened after the Gulf War.

It was not the United States who invaded Kuwait; it was Iraq. It was not the United States that went to war with Iran; it was Iraq. It was not the United States that fired chemical weapons at Iran; it was Iraq. And it was not the United States that murdered innocent Iraqi citizens with chemical weapons; it was Iraq.

Israeli government & the neocons want US to bomb Iran.

There's a certain amount of sympathy here for the Bush administration's problem, which is they would like to get rid of Saddam Hussein and they would like to have the Kurds autonomous.

Why did we go to war? Why did we pick people from South Carolina, California, and all the places in between to go to a foreign land and risk their lives and have some die? To make sure that Saddam Hussein could do no more damage to the region or us than he has already done.

Put simply, the Bush administration policy in the Middle East is continuing to fail.

Until 1956, America treated Israel not much differently from other friendly states.

Saddam Hussein could have provided irreplaceable help to future historians of the Iran/Iraq war, of the invasion of Kuwait, and of the subsequent era of sanctions culminating in the current invasion.

It's remarkable that the failures of the Obama, Clinton, Kerry foreign policy are not only uniting the Left and Right in Israel but might even be creating some common ground between Israel and the Palestinian Authority.

When we see a lack of leadership coming from the White House, that's what brings leaders in Turkey to attack Israel the way they do. When we see a lack of leadership coming from the White House, that's why we see the leader of Iran... continuing to build the nuclear reactors.

When Prime Minister Erdogan came to Washington in 2009, he sounded almost like the ambassador from Iran.

Many critics of the Palestinians, especially those in Congress, think the current calm is merely the eye of the storm. That's why the House of Representatives approved a foreign aid package last week that forbade the direct financial assistance to the Palestinian Authority .

After spending the 1980s building up Saddam's Iraq as a counterweight to Iran, U.S. policy abruptly reversed course with his invasion of Kuwait and has since tried to cut him down to size. The policy is called 'containment,' but the question is, containment of what?

Israel has always been pro-American. Israel will always be pro-American.

The Iranian people, with regards to the policies of various American administrations in the past 30 years, are very worried. They don't trust them.

I think the Bush Administration had basically inherited a policy toward Iraq from the Reagan/Bush Administration that saw Iraq as a kind of fire wall against Iranian fundamentalism. And as it developed over the 1980s, it became a real political run-a-muck... even though the Iraqis were known to be harboring Palestinian terrorists.

People make mistakes. And one of the mistakes that the United States consistently made was that it could intervene and somehow adjust people's governments, especially in the Middle East.

From 2002 to the end of his presidency, George W. Bush routinely was accused by the Left of 'creating chaos:' chaos in Iraq, chaos in Afghanistan, chaos in the Muslim world, chaos among our allies.

And in Iraq we tried to implement the same policy that was so successful in Saudi Arabia, but Saddam Hussein didn't buy. When the economic hit men fail in this scenario, the next step is what we call the jackals.

It took the Gulf War to demonstrate that America did want more than one friend in the Mideast, and also was willing to take and make major risks to prevent a small Muslim country, Kuwait, from being overrun and in effect stolen by Iraq.

When it comes to the Middle East, this is always a very difficult issue for any American president.