Alcee Hastings Quotes

The road ahead is not easy. Iraq is currently the center of the war on terror.

By the time the United States went to war with Afghanistan in the fall of 2001, I had made three trips to the country. I covered the fall of the Taliban in Kandahar and have been returning routinely for the past 14 years.

As we continue to make great progress in the war on terror, now more than ever, it is important that members of the international community stand-by and bolster the efforts of the emerging diplomatic leaders in Iraq and Afghanistan.

It was essentially for self defence that we went to war in Afghanistan and would go to war in Iraq.

The war on terror is the war in Afghanistan.

Four years ago, I promised to end the war in Iraq. We did. I promised to refocus on the terrorists who actually attacked us on 9/11. We have. We've blunted the Taliban's momentum in Afghanistan, and in 2014, our longest war will be over. A new tower rises above the New York skyline, al Qaeda is on the path to defeat, and Osama bin Laden is dead.

Iraq is in a civil war. There is no road in that country that is safe.

That was one of the great successes of removing Saddam Hussein, as we took Iraq out of the picture of having a sovereign nation from which the terrorists could operate. But this war has not gone perfectly.

Three years into the war, tens of thousands of American troops remain targets of a growing Iraqi insurgency.

We have to bring stability to Iraq, otherwise we will be faced with a future dilemma of sending our loved ones into harms way to stop a civil war or the rise of a new tyrant born from the instability that we created.

There is no question that Iraq is one of the main problems. You'd have to be blind not to see what a magnet and generating force it's become for terrorist groups.

It’s hard to convince people you are bombing that you’re doing it for their own good.

To achieve something in Afghanistan is difficult; to maintain it is much more difficult.

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

Osama bin Laden is gone. The war in Iraq is over. Afghanistan is coming to a close.

It is important to recognize the differences between the war in Iraq and the war on terrorism. The treatment of those detained at Abu Ghraib is governed by the Geneva Conventions, which have been signed by both the U.S. and Iraq.

It would be immoral to walk away from the consequences of our actions, leaving behind anarchy and civil war in Iraq.

Surely our inaction with respect to Syria is a poor precedent if we're fighting a war on terror.

Iraq and Afghanistan will, over time, become stable. But the War on Terror will continue long after Iraq and Afghanistan have had success in standing up their own governments.

So a truthful assessment of how America is doing in the war on terror as a result of President Bush's war on Iraq is that we have been set back by decades.

The fate of Syria hangs in the balance, but it is entirely possible that the fall of the Assad regime will result in anarchy and cause Syria to turn into a second Afghanistan, a base for anti-Israel terrorism.

Unquestionably, the mission in Iraq has become more dangerous and difficult.

When you scan the globe's hot spots, every civil war and massacre, every act of terror and every clash between states has its unique local circumstances.

We were in opposition to the decision to go to war. But after the war happened, it was clear that you could not sit and look-there would be a breeding ground for terrorism or a new collapsed or failed state named Iraq!

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.