Tom Cotton Quotes

Well, I think it's too early to call Fallujah a failure.

When I first arrived in Baghdad in January 2003, I thought I would soon rent a house and envisioned myself swimming in the Tigris to cool off after reporting in the city the caliphs called Madinit al-Salam, the City of Peace. A year later, I realized I wouldn't be taking any midnight dips - Madinat al-Salam no more.

As we have heard, the end of al-Zarqawi is a significant blow to al-Qaida operations in Iraq. It is another clear indication of the progress we are making.

Well, I've been to Iraq twice now. I was in Baghdad in June and then north of Baghdad in November.

Make no mistake, our troops will be in Afghanistan and Iraq for a long time.

The U.S. and Britain are incapable of controlling all of Iraq.

The initial [Iraq] war was won in about 6 weeks, but the peace was lost soon thereafter.

By the end of 2008, clearly the Al Qaeda and Sunni insurgency had been relatively stabilized. And in the Al Qaeda's mind, they were defeated.

These Sunni Arabs in places like al Anbar province in Iraq, where I served back in 2007, if they see Iran as the dominant power, a Shiite country, they're going to be much more likely to want to join ISIS.

Almost immediately, I remember right when Tikrit even fell, a few days after Baghdad fell, there was talks of insurgency, there was talks of jihad and of resisting the American occupiers, and slowly this turned into an organized movement.

The reality in Iraq is that we are creating new terrorists and severely damaging the public impression of the United States in the Muslim world.

We are tangled in a very significant Islamic insurgency in Iraq.

I have been to Iraq on a number of occasions. I was with the first group that went in.

I took a trip in 2004, a year after the war started in Iraq. I played music on the streets of Baghdad for Iraqi civilians. I'd also play for U.S. soldiers at night when they were off duty in the bars. Then I would talk to people, and I would film them and ask them about their life and the conflict.

There are no American infidels in Baghdad. Never!

We know that there are various activities important to the insurgents in Iraq that are occurring in Syria.

What we now have in Iraq is a defeat.

Religion is as much a living spring of violence today as it was at any time in the past. The recent conflicts in Palestine (Jews versus Muslims), the Balkans (Orthodox Serbians versus Catholic Croatians; Orthodox Serbians versus Bosnian and Albanian Muslims), Northern Ireland (Protestants versus Catholics), Kashmir (Muslims versus Hindus), Sudan (Muslims versus Christians and animists), Nigeria (Muslims versus Christians), Ethiopia and Eritrea (Muslims versus Christians), Sri Lanka (Sinhalese Buddhists versus Tamil Hindus), Indonesia (Muslims versus Timorese Christians), Iran and Iraq (Shiite versus Sunni Muslims), and the Caucasus (Orthodox Russians versus Chechen Muslims; Muslim Azerbaijanis versus Catholic and Orthodox Armenians) are merely a few cases in point. In these places religion has been the explicit cause of literally millions of deaths in the last 10 years.

You can’t separate the struggle against the Baathists (of Iraq) from the struggle against global terrorism.

Listen, we’re making good progress in Iraq. Sometimes its hard to tell it when you listen to the filter.

In order to have defense here at home, we have to have offense in Iraq and Iran.

The fighting in Iraq has clearly demonstrated the strength of the bond between America and the Shiite heretics

We need to significantly increase the number of bombing runs we're conducting in Iraq and Syria.

Undersecretary of Defense Doug Feith was equally insistent in 2002-2003 about an operational relationship between al Qaeda and the Iraqi government.

Coalition forces have encountered serious violence in some areas of Iraq. Our military commanders report that this violence is being insticated by three groups.