Richard Armitage Quotes

Don't invade Iraq. Inspections work, war won't.

If it must come to war, I argue that the world should respond through the United Nations. This is the best way to give legitimacy to the use of force in these circumstances.

Regime change cannot be the objective of military action.

The Senate is rushing to vote on whether to declare war on Iraq without pausing to ask why. Why is war being dealt with not as a last resort but as a first resort?

When our vital interests are challenged, or the will and conscience of the international community is defied, we will act; with peaceful diplomacy whenever possible, with force when necessary.

We went into Iraq because Saddam Hussein refused to account for his weapons of mass destruction, consistently violated UN resolutions and in a post-9/11 world no American president could afford to give Saddam Hussein the benefit of the doubt.

One of the extraordinary features of the Blair government has been its slavish support for the central tenets of Bush's foreign policy - above all, the war in Iraq. During the Cold War, the Wilson government resisted the suggestion that it should send troops to Vietnam.

The purposes of the United States should not be doubted. The Security Council resolutions will be enforced - the just demands of peace and security will be met - or action will be unavoidable. And a regime that has lost its legitimacy will also lose its power.

Whatever one wants to say about the conduct of the Iraq War, going to war to remove Saddam Hussein in 2003 was a necessary act. It should and could have been done earlier, had not the Clinton White House, which understood the need, not wasted the opportunity through timidity and bluster.

The international community unfortunately did take sides in Libya, and we would never allow the Security Council to authorise anything similar to what happened in Libya.

Today, war of necessity is used by critics of military action to describe unavoidable response to an attack like that on Pearl Harbor that led to our prompt, official declaration of war, while they characterize as unwise wars of choice the wars in Korea, Vietnam and the current war in Iraq.

I think that war is diplomacy by other means, for sure, and there have been wars that have been fought for righteous reasons. There are wars that have had to be fought, and there will probably continue to be.

I voted no on the resolution to give the president authority to go to war against Iraq. I was able to apply caveat emptor. Most of my colleagues could not.

If there is no direct threat why are we invading?

In the euphoria after the Cold War, there was a misplaced notion that the UN could solve every problem anywhere.

First, we could have defied both of them and could have gone to war against both of these nations for this violation of international law and interference with our neutral rights.

As someone who has seen war first hand, and as a father of three young adults, it was my hope that we could have resolved this conflict and disarmed Saddam Hussein without war. However, this was not the case.

So to recap: we may or may not be going to war with Iraq because Saddam may or may not have weapons of mass destruction, which he may or may not use, or pass to other terrorists groups with whom he may or may not have links.

War can only be abolished through war, and in order to get rid of the gun it is necessary to take up the gun.

Resolution 1441 does not give anyone the right to an automatic use of force. Russia believes that the Iraqi problem should be regulated by the Security Council, which carries the main responsibility for ensuring international security.

I still think it would be a great mistake to go into a war without support of our friends and allies.

I can imagine that the Iraqis undertake the destruction out of fear. If they had denied it, if they had said no, that certainly would have played into the hands of those that would like to take armed action immediately. I have no illusions in that regard.

In time it will become clear to everyone that support for the policies of pre-emptive war and interventionist nation-building will have much greater significance than the removal of Saddam Hussein itself.

The disagreeable reality for those who believe in human rights is that there are some occasions - and Iraq may be one of them - when war is the only real remedy for regimes that live by terror.

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.