Barack Obama Quotes

We're facing a very different sort of threat now, a more amorphous threat, al Qaeda, terrorism, and so on. And so the military has abandoned the two-war strategy.

When you look around now we have the war on terror. Yes, okay, the World Trade Center was sort of like a single act of war, but nothing else has been. We've turned it into war. We're talking about a bunch of semi-lunatic, fanatic criminals. That's the way they should be treated.

The latest developments in Iraq are deeply troubling, but as the United States considers military and diplomatic responses to the actions of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) action, we should be clear that U.S. troops on the ground cannot go a million miles near a sectarian civil war-it's simply not an option.

The fight against radical Islamic terrorists and ISIS has been called the war of our time.

Many in the U.S. military believe ISIS needs to be immediately, and repeatedly, smashed by American drones and warplanes.

Whether core al Qaeda or its offshoots like AQAP, ISIS, or the many others - we are working with our partners to find and disrupt them, wherever they are, whether they're plotting attacks on Americans here at home or abroad.

To say that we're going to end countries or eradicate terrorism, and that it's a long war over many years, with many different instruments, suggests a much more complex and drawn-out conflict for which, I think, most Americans aren't prepared.

Americans are at war with radical Islamic terrorism. We are at war with the ISIS caliphate, and what we need is a commander-in-chief who knows that, who understands that, who will give our military the resources they need to make that fight, pull our allies together - including moderate Arab nations - and hunt down and destroy ISIS and other terrorist organizations at their source.

You've got to hae ground forces that are capable of going after them and rooting them out.

We need to wage this war against ISIS from the air, on the ground, and online, in cyberspace.

Instead of being a Woodrow Wilson democracy promoter we ought to hunt down our enemies and kill ISIS rather than creating opportunities for ISIS to take control of new countries.

We're making progress. Our military is assisting in Iraq. And we're hoping that within the year we'll be able to push ISIS out of Iraq and then, you know, really squeeze them in Syria.

I have made it clear that we will hunt down terrorists who threaten our country, wherever they are. That means I will not hesitate to take action against ISIL in Syria, as well as Iraq. This is a core principle of my presidency: if you threaten America, you will find no safe haven.

[Hillary] Clinton, we are not where we need to be in the fight against ISIS.

What really happened in Vietnam was- all these things are away games for the American military. We're not on our home turf, which means to succeed there has to be a partner. And the definition of partnership is someone willing to risk their lives in their home area to prevail because they think it's necessary to build a decent life and a better life for their people.

We're trying to find areas of cooperation with Russia in the area of counterterrorism and the campaign against ISIS.

As we keep up the pressure, our air campaign will continue to hit ISIL harder than ever.

For anybody here who's very worried about domestic priorities, just consider we have created, with this war on terrorism, more fighters, more countries embroiled. They're learning new weapons. They're learning new techniques. They're coming here in social media. The lone wolf thing is expanding. And once that blows here, then forget about domestic priorities.

Defeating ISIS. If we do not defeat them abroad, we will be facing more and more of a threat at home. This does not require an occupation or an enduring ground operation.

The good news is that the international coalition, in which our military contributes, has done a lot to reduce the ground space, the territory in Iraq, Syria that ISIL once occupied a couple years ago. That's a good thing. And a lot of that, frankly, has occurred in Trump administration, so I'll give them credit for that.

I really wanted to talk about the War on Terror and say that both sides were completely incompetent [in addressing it]. You can't blame the other side when you're involved in it.

I am quite confident that in the foreseeable future armed conflict will not take the form of huge land armies facing each other across extended battle lines, as they did in World War I and World War II or, for that matter, as they would have if NATO had faced the Warsaw Pact on the field of battle.

As many critics have pointed, out, terrorism is not an enemy. It is a tactic. Because the United States itself has a long record of supporting terrorists and using terrorist tactics, the slogans of today's war on terrorism merely makes the United States look hypocritical to the rest of the world.

I think it's very hard to fight the war on terrorism if we're in retreat.

Conservatives believe that we need to defeat radical Islam not because we want war but because ISIS and other radical Islamist are enemies of peace and that's why we need a president, who in which under whom the best intelligence agencies in the world will find terrorists and the best military in the world will destroy them. And if we capture them alive, a president that will bring them to the United States. A president that will grant them a court-appointed lawyer, a president that will send these terrorists where they belong, to Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.