Rick Santorum Quotes

Should President Clinton have killed Osama bin Laden when he had the opportunity in 1990s? Should President Bush have sent the U.S. military into Iraq to depose Saddam Hussein in 2003? Should President Obama have withdrawn all troops from Iraq in 2011? Such questions provide no real insight into future considerations.

President Bush has a track record of making the right decisions when it comes to national security.

Sooner or later something had to give. But President Bush, faced with the unprecedented affront of 9-11, could not wait to take action. So he had to do what we were capable of doing, and he did it brilliantly.

On September 4, 2001, the Principals Committee met in the White House Situation Room. CIA Director George Tenet and the DOD leadership both spoke out against the use of armed Predators tp get bin Laden and the Al Qaeda leadership. They were not overruled [by President George W. Bush]. A week later we were attacked [on September 11].

President Obama deserves our unalloyed praise for hastening Osama bin Laden's demise.

Four years ago, I promised to end the war in Iraq. We did. I promised to refocus on the terrorists who actually attacked us on 9/11. We have. We've blunted the Taliban's momentum in Afghanistan, and in 2014, our longest war will be over. A new tower rises above the New York skyline, al Qaeda is on the path to defeat, and Osama bin Laden is dead.

So a truthful assessment of how America is doing in the war on terror as a result of President Bush's war on Iraq is that we have been set back by decades.

The United States does not view our authority to use military force against Al Qaeda as being restricted solely to 'hot' battlefields like Afghanistan.

If I had been in President Obama's shoes, I would have acted more decisively and strongly against ISIS.

A dangerous idea is gaining currency within a segment of the American populace. If a person does not support the United States-British bombing expedition in Afghanistan, it means that he or she backs Osama bin Laden and the Al-Qaeda

Your first priority is to go after bin Laden.

The problem was you didn’t have an approach against Al Qaeda because you didn’t have an approach against Afghanistan. And you didn’ have an approach against Afghanistan because you didn’t have an approach against Pakistan. And until we could get that right, we didn’t have a policy.

Any of these defense initiatives, looked at 10 years later, you end up asking, “Was it worth it?” Look at Vietnam. Look at Iraq 10 years later. Bin Laden, The War on Terror? We spent a trillion dollars over 10 years to put a 50 cent round in this guy’s head. Everybody thinks that’s a huge success. I don’t know.

When the president went around the table to the country's national security leadership, Hillary was clear: We have to go get bin Laden. And our Special Operations Forces did just that.

If we have Osama bin Laden in our sights and the Pakistani government is unable or unwilling to take them out, then, I think that we have to act and we will take them out. We will kill bin Laden. We will crush al Qaeda. That has to be our biggest national security priority.

I happen to be one of those in the antiwar part of things who actually supported Bill Clinton when he sent the cruise missiles in to take out bin Laden. I had thought we had the right to use Special Forces to go in for bin Laden. He had attacked American embassies. He attacked ships. And so, I didn't see any need to coddle the Taliban.

Denying Al Qaeda safe haven was the right decision.

With the NDAA, his failure to close Guantanamo Bay and the ramping use of drones, President Obama looks suspiciously like President Bush, a man on a quest for American Empire.

Obama killed Osama. Yes, President Barack Obama gets to crow about the killing of Osama bin Laden.

I don't think there's any question that America is safer as a result of the bin Laden operation.

When I look at the record of President Obama concerning the major issue security I think it's a highly satisfactory record from Israeli point of view.

Al Qaeda is almost all in Pakistan, and Pakistan has nuclear weapons. And yet for every dollar we're spending in Pakistan, we're spending $30 in Afghanistan. Does that make strategic sense?

Historians evaluating George W. Bush's first term will focus on foreign policy and, most of all, 9/11. I think they will criticize him for his early reaction, for not returning at once to Washington, D.C.

I think President Obama has always been a little bit underestimated. Some of the things he's done with foreign policy have been unassailable. Getting us out of Iraq, killing Osama Bin Laden.

My submission to you is we're fighting the war on terror not overseas but in our own streets, and we'd be spending vast more fortunes to try to be a defensive country to protect ourselves rather than an offensive country to spread democracy wherever people yearn for it.