Tom Cotton Quotes

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.

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.

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

Iraq is falling apart.

Our priority is to go after ISIL. And so what we have said is that we are not engaging in a military action against the Syrian regime. We are going after ISIL facilities and personnel who are using Syria as a safe haven, in service of our strategy in Iraq.

To leave Afghanistan as a playground for terrorists and adventurers was simply not possible anymore.

What we now have in Iraq is a defeat.

Iraq is a terrible place. Some fool American is going to come out here and try to redesign it

ISIS filled the vacuum in Iraq and Syria created by a lack of effective governance.

The Sunni militants that make up ISIS are not the underlying problem in Syria and Iraq, but rather they are a symptom of other deeper problems.

The overall feckless strategy against ISIS in Syria and Iraq enabled the Islamist organization to expand its domain and drive out more religious minorities.

We pulled out of Libya. Now look what's happened: a safe haven, a vacuum, ISIS training militants to hit in Tunisia.

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.

Hillary Clinton gave us ISIS, because her and Obama created this huge vacuum, and a small group came out of that huge vacuum because when - we should never have been in Iraq, but once we were there, we should have never got out the way they wanted to get out.

ISIS is a monstrosity. It didn't come from nowhere. It's one of the results of the U.S. hitting a very vulnerable society - Iraq - with a sledgehammer.

The greatest disaster of all was after all the difficulties and loss of life and expenditures, President [Barak] Obama walked away, in 2011, and it is a disaster. And now we've got half of Iraq under the ISIS control and terrorists, and Iran has moved in because we weren't there, and they've taken more influence. Just a few thousand troops, in my opinion, would have avoided that.

All you have to do is see the way ISIS was created in the vacuum left by Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama out of Iraq.

Whether or not Afghanistan would be a peaceful nation-state had we not gone into Iraq I doubt. Afghanistan is going to be Afghanistan, no matter how hard we try to make it something else.

When we toppled [Muammar] Gadhafi in Libya, I think that was a mistake. I think ISIS grew stronger, we had a failed state, and we were more at risk.

Today, Iraq is Harvard for terrorism.

Iraq is now the central front in the war against al-Qaeda.

I hope by the time I am president that we will have pushed ISIS out of Iraq.

From a geo-strategic point of view, I consider Iran a bigger problem than the Islamic State. ISIS is a group of adventurers with a very aggressive ideology. But they have to conquer more and more territory before they can became a geo-strategic, permanent reality. I think a conflict with ISIS - important as it is - is more manageable than a confrontation with Iran.

Iraq broke our back in terms of counterterrorism. There's no doubt about it. The first thing, though, that hurt us was the fact that the U.S. military was absolutely unprepared to do anything on 9/11 - or 9/12 or 9/13. And by the time we actually attacked Afghanistan, al Qaeda and the Taliban had dispersed.

The majority of fighters now are Al-Qaeda. If you want to support them, you are supporting Al-Qaeda, you are creating havoc in the region, and if this region is not stable, the whole world cannot be stable.