John Chilcot Quotes

Our troops are committed to bringing security to Iraq while its government matures. American forces will continue to accomplish their mission with caution, precision and honor with the thanks of a grateful nation.

Our military is doing everything it can to equip Iraq's forces so our troops can come home as soon as possible, but we cannot leave until the job is done.

I was heartened to hear the President say that as we make progress on the ground, and Iraqi forces increasingly take the lead, we should be able to further decrease our troop levels.

We have to go in and win this war quickly, and then be prepared to help stabilize Iraq over an indefinite period, five to ten years, at a minimum, I believe, using a large fraction of American forces. This is a major undertaking that likely would require a total of 150,000 troops and could stay above 100,000 for several years

But the central point is that any campaign against Iraq, whatever the strategy, cost and risks, is certain to divert us for some indefinite period from our war on terrorism.

I did more than anyone else in persuading the U.S. to get rid of Saddam.

Iraq is not occupied, but there are foreign forces on its soil, which is different.

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.

We are running out of time. We need a strategy to win in Iraq or an exit strategy to leave.

I can't tell you if the use of force in Iraq today will last five days, five weeks or five months, but it won't last any longer than that.

The doctrine of preemption has a long and distinguished history in the history of American foreign policy.

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

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.

There is no area where experience matters more than in war and diplomacy.

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.

I’d rather build highways here then try nation building in Iraq

Someone should tell the president that U.S. forces would need to be in Iraq for two to five years, and they will not have an easy time there.

To suggest that we need several hundred thousand troops there after military operations ceased, I don’t think is accurate…. We will in fact be greeted as liberators.

We went in there [the Iraq War invasion] with a complete misunderstanding, regionally and inside Iraq, of what was going on. I don’t ever want that to happen again.

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

When it comes to the greater Middle East, McMaster brings to the table his own deep knowledge of Iraq and Afghanistan, countries where he served for many years.

I watched the Bush administration overreact to the Clinton administration, who believed they did too much nation building, sustaining other countries, and that's why we never put the commitment on Afghanistan and Iraq that should have been in there under their policy leadership.

I don't think that anyone in the pages of 'War on Peace' is arguing that diplomacy is the replacement for military power. But, correctly, the job of the military is to think tactically.

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.