Ariel Sharon Quotes

No American President should ever take any option off the table.

The United States will do whatever we have to do to protect our forces.

Very near the heart of all foreign affairs is the relationship between policy and military power.

Presidents should plan for war before they threaten war.

Contributing to the maintenance of peace by making clear its determination to exercise the right of individual or collective self-defense … should any armed attack occur affecting its national security.

War should never be thought of as something autonomous, but always as an instrument of policy.

I will not put the life of an American service member on the line unless that is the option of last resort.

Bob Gates has unusual standing in the debate about the Obama administration's foreign policy: He was defense secretary for both a hawkish President George W. Bush and a wary President Obama. He understood Bush's desire to project power and Obama's skepticism.

I have not taken a position on that nuclear option. My view is I'm not going to do anything until I come to that bridge. I'm not going to jump off the bridge until I come to it.

Your message is stupid. Iraq is not afraid of you or anyone else when it has a right to claim. What you warned about is not on Iraq's agenda. Iraq is vital and powerful. It is not an opportunistic country. Your administration has not learned from the past.

This nation's elected leaders owe all Americans the duty of formulating an Iraqi policy based on sound analysis of the actual facts.

The American people have no control over what the military does. We have no say in American foreign policy.

I have always thought that Israel, as an independent and sovereign nation, had a right to defend itself.

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.

I believe there should be no arbitrary date set for withdrawal and yet no permanent, unending deployment. No cut and run, yet measured progress in helping a people who want to be free without an illusion of overnight success.

If you wait until those weapons pose a direct, clear, present danger to the United States, you've probably waited too long.

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.

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.

I believe that sooner or later we're going to have to deal with Saddam Hussein, because of his general reputation, because of what I'm convinced he's done with regard to terrorism and the support thereof. But I'm not at all sure I believe that it has to be right now.

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

Preemption is the right of any nation in order to preserve its National Security; however, preemptive war is a tactic, not a strategy. When used as a strategy preemption dilutes diplomacy, creates an atmosphere of distrust, and promotes regional instability.

This experience actually means the very opposite: the largest military power was unable to stop such a sensitive attack and will be unable to rule out such a possibility in the future. Precisely this is the background to the United States' military interventions.

I used to have a little saying I used when people said, 'What are your priorities?' I'd give them a bit of government alphabet soup. I'd say 'CTCPROW: Counterterrorism, counterproliferation, rest of the world.'

I knew it to be very doubtful whether the Cabinet, Parliament, and the country would take this view on the outbreak of war, and through the whole of this week I had in view the probable contingency that we should not decide at the critical moment to support France.