Jack Keane Quotes

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

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.

Woe to the statesman whose reason for entering a war do not appear so plausible at its end as at its beginning.

I could have been very popular if I had launched a military attack on Iran but I chose patience.

The Pentagon is always going to be the last to want to intervene. It is up to the civilians to tell us what they want to do and we’ll figure out how to do it.

In Washington the semantics of the military muted the reality of war for the civilian policy-makers. In quiet, air-conditioned, thick-carpeted rooms, such terms as 'systematic pressure,' 'armed reconnaissance,' 'targets of opportunity,' and even 'body count' seemed to breed a sort of games-theory detachment.

A United States President should never, never, never, never threaten the use of force unless he is prepared to follow up.

I believe that the president's (Bush) leadership in the actions taken in Iraq demonstrate an incompetence in terms of knowledge, judgment and experience in making the decisions that would have been necessary to truly accomplish the mission without the deaths to our troops and the cost to our taxpayers.

I think the key anecdote in the book is when Colin [Powell] and I were discussing Iraq. Colin was upstairs in the Treaty Room, in the residence. And he talks about his concerns about the use of military in Iraq. And I said I felt the same concerns, but it might be that we have to use it. In which case, he said, "I support you."

We must have a timetable for withdrawal of U.S. forces - or at the very least a plan for it - something the administration has incredulously failed to do for over two years.

You could get a cheer by saying: 'Let's withdraw from Afghanistan', but I don't think that's where the public's at. It wouldn't be responsible.

We have a model that we're following, and it's the Libya model.

At every election, my vote goes to the candidate less likely to declare war. You're dropping hugely expensive pieces of exploding metal on a population. America deserves the president it gets, whether the country votes for them or allows their vote to be stolen, and the least we can do is to elect someone who won't do that to other people.

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.

There are a lot of things that have to be considered in National. The military aspect of it is only one of them. I'm confident that President Bush will have all of those things laid out for him before he makes the decision.

One of the lessons of Vietnam, which we failed to heed in the Iraq war and the Afghanistan surge, is that before you commit U.S. military forces to aid or assist, it is essential to know what you want them to achieve.

War is too serious a matter to entrust to military men.

Our safety requires a long-term military presence in the Middle East because that's where the plans to attack us are emanating.

Tonight, I concurred with President Bush when he stated that the decisions on future involvement of U.S. troops in Iraq should be left to the Pentagon and not politicians in Washington.

What's the point of having this superb military your always talking about if we can’t use it?

There is no area where experience matters more than in war and diplomacy.

No American witnessing the way that President George W. Bush and his generals have bungled the Iraq war can deny that our leaders, civilian and military alike, will have to get a lot smarter if the U.S. armed services are to persuade the Islamic world to embrace the blessings of democracy.

Don't ever, ever go to war unless you can describe and create a more desirable end state. And doing so takes a whole lot more than just the use of force.

Statecraft, as these cases convincingly illustrate, is demanding and often exhausting work. There are risks, and success is not guaranteed. It requires major governmental and political resources and the same kind of hourly, year-round planning and execution as the conduct of a military campaign.

Is a military solution the only way to stop nations from doing bad things?