W. Averell Harriman Quotes

More and more countries, mostly all countries, do not want large American forces on their soil. That’s a reality. We can live in the denial of that, but we are also living in the reality of that.

We now have the opportunity of giving to the USSR its Vietnam war.

My solution to the problem would be to tell the North Vietnamese Communists frankly that they've got to drawn in their horns and stop their aggression or we're going to bomb them into the stone age.

We have no quarrel with America. We all know NATO is the strongest military machine in the world. We simply want them to stop being so busy with our country and worry about their own problems.

We cannot assert that the policy of sustained reprisal will succeed in changing the course of the contest in Vietnam. It may fail and we cannot estimate the odds of success with any accuracy.

We do not stand equally distant from the U.S.A. and the Soviet Union … American troops are in West Germany in order that free trade unions exist and Soviet troops are in Poland to see to it that free trade unions there do not exist. That is the difference.

It makes no difference who says that our objective is peace, even if he be the President of the United States. Our actions speak louder than words, and our actions in Asia today are the actions of warmaking.

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.

I don't recall anyone who was strongly against except one man, and that was the President [JFK]. The President just didn't want to be convinced that this was the right thing to do.... It was really the President's personal conviction that U.S. ground troops shouldn't go in.

I don't think Russia could start a war by attacking any of the NATO member states.

Our purpose in Vietnam is to prevent the success of aggression. It is not conquest, it is not empire, it is not foreign bases, it is not domination. It is, simply put, just to prevent the forceful conquest of South Vietnam by North Vietnam.

The United States can't impose democracies. We can't impose our will. The Russians found that out in Afghanistan.

American troops have not only occupied Ulster but are arriving in increasing numbers in England.

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

American presence is, you know, the major cause of balance of power and the stability in this region.

The unthinkable occurred: two communist countries went to war with each other.

We didn't push the Russians to intervene, but we knowingly increased the probability that they would.

We will not send troops. Germany is not committed to Iraq - we will not commit ourselves with troops.

Russia knows of the vulnerability of her frontiers in this part of the world.

I don't think that anyone seriously fears that the world can be blown to pieces all together. But what one can fear and rightly so are regional things, like in the Middle East, India, Pakistan, the Korean Peninsula, borders in Africa, etc.

Johnson had been the most powerful man in the world, yet the North Vietnamese and the Vietcong had resisted, overcome his power, broken his will.

South Vietnam had to be built from scratch and, from the very beginning, depended far too much on the Western superpowers. As in the case of a person on public welfare, this dependency, which became greater with each day, was quite difficult to shake.

Eritrea is hellbent on destabilising Ethiopia. It does not care who it sleeps with.

We should declare war on North Vietnam. We could pave the whole country and put parking strips on it, and still be home by Christmas.

Vietnam was really an idealistic thing to stop the spread of communism, which, incidentally, it did. It was a pretty costly way to do it, but it achieved its goal.