Jack Keane Quotes

America's foreign policy lacks the backbone to do the right thing in Afghanistan - which is leave.

Republican control of the Senate = expanded neocon wars in Syria and Iraq. Boots on the ground are coming!

We must win in Iraq. If we withdraw, there will be chaos; there will be genocide; and they will follow us home.

Afghanistan would have been difficult enough without Iraq. Iraq made it impossible. The argument that had we just focused on Afghanistan we'd now be okay is persuasive, but it omits the fact that we weren't supposed to get involved in nation-building in Afghanistan.

Governor Dean has no policy on Iraq evidently, except 'no.' 'No' is not a policy.

You can't just drop the 82nd Airborne into Baghdad and it will all be over.

We must have a timetable for withdrawal of U.S. forces - or at the very least a plan for it - something the administration has incredulously failed to do for over two years.

I'm going to vote in support of the president of the United States in keeping the troops in Iraq until the president and our military is convinced that the mission is complete.

And then there's Israel - a lot of people support Israel, and it's important to Israel to take out Iraq. So it's all mixed together. It's a combination of motives.

You could get a cheer by saying: 'Let's withdraw from Afghanistan', but I don't think that's where the public's at. It wouldn't be responsible.

Instead, we did take our eye off the ball. We decided, instead of finishing the job in Afghanistan, to go into Iraq. And today, unfortunately, if you look at the situation on the ground, it is a mess.

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.

Tony Blair is a brilliant politician. Unfortunately, his legacy is entwined with George W. Bush because of Iraq.

The Iraqis are not threatened by the Turks or by the Iranians or by the Saudis and they tell me that these are not weapons of mass destruction, they are weapons of self-destruction.

One of the lessons of Vietnam, which we failed to heed in the Iraq war and the Afghanistan surge, is that before you commit U.S. military forces to aid or assist, it is essential to know what you want them to achieve.

I have never believed you go to war in Iraq, you go to war in Afghanistan, and believe that you can deal with those battlefields, those countries, in microcosms, or narrow channels.

The United States of America… cannot have a viable foreign policy if we are humiliated in Vietnam. We must not lose in Vietnam. It’s as cold as that. Right?... And they have not given us any way to avoid being humiliated. And since they have not, we must draw the sword, so the blockade is on.

A great power that uses force far less than vital interests, and that does so frequently or with a short fuse, risks mobilizing other states to join ranks to balance against it.

The question in my mind then is how many additional American casualties is Saddam worth? And the answer is not very damned many.

I don’t think that we have ever had a coherent strategy on Iraq.

Running on the pledge to end two wars, President Obama has the country entangled in three: Syria, Afghanistan and Iraq, and that doesn't include the American's foray into Libya.

I think the Bush Administration was bound and determined on regime change, and we will be paying the price of that for some time to come.

You just hope that we haven't soured an entire generation on the necessity, from time to time, of using force because Iraq has been such a debacle. That would be tragic because Iran is a grave threat.

I profoundly do not believe that the United States could make things better in Syria by being there. And we have an evidentiary record of what happens when we're there - nearly a decade in Iraq.

I think that the decision to go to war in Iraq was a mistake.