Richard Holbrooke Quotes
It is essential that the foreign forces who have invaded and occupy large parts of the Congo halt their offensive action
Holbrooke, Richard. Statement to the United Nations Security Council on the Democratic Republic of the Congo. United Nations, 24 Jan. 2000.
In the aftermath of World War I the Greeks invaded Turkish held Smyrna to "protect" the ethnic Greek population there. It was a great military blunder and exposed the Greek military to the Turks. This isI a candid private statement of the fact that admission of a military blunder would cause the government to fall that never was made public,
During the Iraq War, the Congressman partially changed his mind the following year and called for a plan to move American troops to the periphery of the fighting. A highly decorated war hero with two Purple Hearts, he was then called a coward, by some Republican members of Congress and the Bush Administration—almost always by people who had never served in the military and often sought and obtained deferments.
The meaning is that to be victorious in war one should not be inhibited from doing cruel and brutal things that war sometimes necessitates.
He served Presidents Reagan, Clinton, and both Bushes
The Vice President was one of the architects of and advocates for the Iraq War. To garner public support he (and the others supporting the war) claimed that Iraq had developed weapons of mass destruction and made a serious of predictions about the war. He was wrong on all counts. There were no WMDs, none were even being developed, and we needed hundreds of thousands of troops for a decade as we were not greeted as liberators but the vast majority of our casualties and deaths in Iraq came after the invasion was successful and the population showed very hostile to U. S. occupation and our governing policies.
Richard Charles Albert Holbrooke was an American diplomat and author. He was the only person to have held the position of Assistant Secretary of State for two different regions of the world (Asia from 1977 to 1981 and Europe from 1994 to 1996).
