Ted Lieu Quotes

Writing tends to be very deliberate. A novelist could probably run a military campaign with some success. They could certainly run a country.

From a very strategic level, I believe the military is part of the solution to better outcomes around the world, but at a higher level, it's really about economies.

Mistakes, after all, are endemic to foreign and military policy given the unpredictability of events and the difficulty of securing reliable information in a place like Iraq.

There are a lot of things that have to be considered in National. The military aspect of it is only one of them. I'm confident that President Bush will have all of those things laid out for him before he makes the decision.

War is too serious a matter to entrust to military men.

Our safety requires a long-term military presence in the Middle East because that's where the plans to attack us are emanating.

Pat Roberts and I both feel very strongly that when we get to Iran, that we can't make the same mistakes. We have to ask the questions, the hard questions before, not afterwards, and get the right intelligence.

Tonight, I concurred with President Bush when he stated that the decisions on future involvement of U.S. troops in Iraq should be left to the Pentagon and not politicians in Washington.

People (political and military leaders) much prefer to speak of what they are going to do rather than what the outcome will be.

No American witnessing the way that President George W. Bush and his generals have bungled the Iraq war can deny that our leaders, civilian and military alike, will have to get a lot smarter if the U.S. armed services are to persuade the Islamic world to embrace the blessings of democracy.

You don’t just go to a summit meeting and say, ‘What do we talk about?’ These things require much planning. Each one of these meeting has consequences and we have to make sure we have the right consequences.

Presidents should plan for war before they threaten war.

The President has full responsibility, which cannot be shared, for military decisions in a world in which the difference between safety and cataclysm can be a matter of hours or even minutes.

What he's really talking about - and I'm speaking for Mike Flynn, not Donald Trump - is that he's saying, essentially, we have to have options. We have to have a lot of options. And, frankly, we do. We do have a lot of options.

What I'm saying is it is our responsibility to exercise due diligence, to ask the tough questions, to get the evidence before we make those very costly decisions about how and when and where our military is used.

Our nation's military is effective because it is nonpartisan, relies heavily on science and technology, and takes the world as it is, not as it wishes it to be.

I don't want to do a lot of talking on the military. I want to talk after it's finished, not before it starts.

War is much too serious a thing to be left to military men.

We all know that in war the political and military factors have to complement each other.

As proud and capable as it is, I think the idea that the military can build new countries is a tall order, and it's the sort of thing that we would only expect from a military that we have superresourced and thought of as supercapable.

In foreign policy you have to wait twenty-five years to see how it comes out.

Presidents do not go into war lightly. It's a tremendous responsibility in making decisions, and I know Bush must deeply believe this is the only course.

Our modern states are preparing for war without even knowing the future enemy.

Fortunately, President Kennedy and Robert Kennedy disagreed with the estimate and chose a course of action less ambitious and aggressive than recommended by their advisers.

I believe the military should be wary of diplomacy until war is declared; then the State Department should keep its nose out and let the military do whatever is necessary to win.