Barack Obama Quotes

Arab public opinion does not regard Iran as a hostile entity. In fact it's so supportive of Iran that a majority would think the place would be better off if Iran had nuclear weapons. The main enemies are the United States and Isreal, in the 80, 90 percent range.

Iran's continued drive to develop nuclear capabilities, including troubling enrichment activities and past work on weaponization documented by the IAEA, and its continued support to groups like Hezbollah, Hamas and other terrorist organizations make clear that the regime in Tehran is a very grave threat to all of us.

I think it's reality that Iran is going to have influence in Iraq. All elements of Iraq accepted that.

As a state sponsor of global terrorism and supplier of weapons to terrorist groups such as Hamas and Hezbollah, Iran cannot be allowed to develop nuclear weapons capabilities.

There has come into being a kind of a Shia belt from Tehran through Baghdad to Beirut. And this gives Iran the opportunity to reconstruct the ancient Persian Empire - this time under the Shia label.

Iran with a nuclear weapon or with fissile material that can be given to Hezbollah or Hamas or others has the potential of not just destabilizing the Middle East. But it could be brought here.

My red line is Iran may not have a nuclear weapon. It is inappropriate for them to have the capacity to terrorize the world. Iran with a nuclear weapon or with fissile material that can be given to Hezbollah or Hamas or others has the potential of not just destabilizing the Middle East.

I don't know anybody that I can think of who has contended that the Iraqis had nuclear weapons.

Taking stock of 'Operation Iraqi Freedom' a decade later, the Financial Times concluded that the US won the war, Iran won the peace, and Turkey won the contracts. I can only agree.

If you really look at the aftermath of Iraq, Iran is going to be taking over Iraq. They've been doing it. And it's not a pretty picture.

Iran is taking over Iraq. They've been trying to for many, many decades. And now they're finally taking over Iraq. As we sit here, they're taking over Iraq. We get nothing.

The administration took care of a source of instability in Iraq. Envision a world in which Saddam Hussein was rushing for a nuclear weapon to compete against Iran. My decision to remove Saddam Hussein was the correct decision in my judgment. We didn't find the weapons we thought we would find or the weapons everybody thought he had. But he was a significant source of instability.

The victor of the war in Iraq is Iran.

That's a point that Dan Ellsberg has made for years. He said it's kind of like if you and I go into a grocery store to rob it, and I have a gun. The guy may give you the money in the cash register. I'm using the gun even if I don't shoot. Well that's nuclear weapons - essential to post-war deterrence - they cast a shadow over everything.

With all of the history of war, and the human race's history unfortunately has been a good deal more war than peace, with nuclear weapons distributed all through the world, and available, and the strong reluctance of any people to accept defeat, I see the possibility in the 1970's of the President of the United States having to face a world in which 15 or 20 or 25 nations may have these weapons.

[Nuclear war]... may not be desirable.

Before there was the Soviet Union that could inflame matters. Now you have states not as powerful as the Soviet Union, but states like Iraq, like Iran, and to some extent Syria, having made it possible for some of these groups to operate. So it is a very difficult situation.

We are plunging headlong into a cold war, and we have 2,000 nuclear weapons on hair-trigger alert.

Nobody in the Senate on a bipartisan fashion trusts the Iranians. They lie. They cheat. They're a murderous regime. They've been trying to develop a nuclear weapon.

Some of the same politicians and pundits that are so quick to reject the possibility of a diplomatic solution to Iran's nuclear program are the same folks who were so quick to go to war in Iraq and said it would take a few months.

George Bush sold us on going to war with Iraq based on the threat of weapons of mass destruction. But we still haven't found them.

I think they got it wrong with Saddam Hussein. They thought he had the A-Bomb. Instead he had a bomb.

The Cold War philosophy of Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD), which prevented the former Soviet Union and the United States from using the nuclear weapons they had targeted at each other, would not apply to President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's Iran. For him (Ahmadinejad), Mutual Assured Destruction is not a deterrent, it is an inducement.

A nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought. The only value in our two nations possessing nuclear weapons is to make sure they will never be used. But then would it not be better to do away with them entirely?

I think it was the right decision to disarm Saddam Hussein. And when the president made the decision, I supported him, and I support the fact that we did disarm him.