William Hague Quotes

If a senator calls me up and asks me what should we do in Iraq, I'm happy to talk to him.

When you decide to get involved in a military operation in a place like Syria, you've got to be prepared, as we learned from Iraq and Afghanistan, to become the government, and I'm not sure any country, either the United States or I don't hear of anyone else, who's willing to take on that responsibility.

Woe to the statesman whose reason for entering a war do not appear so plausible at its end as at its beginning.

If American citizens don’t trust their government, why should friendly foreigners? If American citizens challenge the authority of American government, why shouldn’t unfriendly governments?

The war against Iraq is as disastrous as it is unnecessary; perhaps in terms of its wisdom, purpose and motives, the worst war in American history... Our military men and women...were not called to defend America but rather to attack Iraq. They were not called to die for, but rather to kill for, their country. What more unpatriotic thing could we have asked of our sons and daughters...?

We, Britain and Germany, can neither of us be happy about our handling of the Iraq war.

The National Security Council's real role is to coordinate the various activities of the government of the United States in the furtherance of American foreign policy.

I don't think people maybe think that the government does tell them the truth. I think they expect politicians who are going to tell them one thing and then when they get in office do something else.

Venezuelan interests are to be defended by Venezuela. The U.S. should defend the interests of the U.S. Where are the U.S. people, where are the intellectuals, who could put limits on their government?

Not all political actors share our vision of fighting terrorism, lessening tensions in the region and focusing on building the economy. It is natural that they would challenge the government, but we have fought every challenge effectively. The daily ups and down of democracy should not be interpreted as lack of stability.

The President, in talking about freedom and democracy, is sparking a wave of very positive democratic sentiment that might help us override both Islamic fundamentalism that has formed in that region, and also some of the hatred for our policies of invading Iraq.

President Obama knows that wars are not to be entered into lightly; he knows that overseas conflicts don't only do damage in the land in which they are fought, but in the land of those who fight them, as well.

It was stunning actually, because what you would hope for from our national leaders is some reflection, some understanding that the situation that we encountered in Iraq was not what we expected, that it was not what he said it would be.

Britain, along with the U.S.A., is war weary, and after the travesty of Iraq and Afghanistan, has grave misgivings in any future involvement in the Middle East. The ghost of Tony Blair and his single-minded determination to attack Iraq, at any cost, has cast a long shadow over British politics. The British public have a long collective memory.

The war in Iraq has as much to do with terrorism as the administration has to do with compassion.

In fact, it struck me when we invaded last year that if we did it without European and East Asian support, we were risking losing our alliance in Europe in exchange for Iraq, and that is a very undesirable exchange.

If your government had given me a thousandth of the sum it spent to depose me, I could have won that war.

I used to have a little saying I used when people said, 'What are your priorities?' I'd give them a bit of government alphabet soup. I'd say 'CTCPROW: Counterterrorism, counterproliferation, rest of the world.'

And that's why I wrote the book, because our country really needs to understand, if people in this nation understood what our foreign policy is really about, what foreign aid is about, how our corporations work, where our tax money goes, I know we will demand change.

If there is one lesson for U.S. foreign policy from the past 10 years, it is surely that military intervention can seem simple but is in fact a complex affair with the potential for unintended consequences.

This president failed so miserably in diplomacy that we are now forced to war.

When you go to war, you have to build bipartisan support and then you have to sustain it.

The possibility of the United States winning the war and losing the peace is real and serious

You have repeatedly asserted that you and the German people have no desire for war. If this is true there need be no war. Nothing can persuade the peoples of the earth that any governing power has any right or need to inflict the consequences of war on its own or any other people save in the cause of self-evident home defense.

By invading Iraq, the President has undermined the War on Terrorism.