Jack Keane Quotes

When you decide to get involved in a military operation in a place like Syria, you've got to be prepared, as we learned from Iraq and Afghanistan, to become the government, and I'm not sure any country, either the United States or I don't hear of anyone else, who's willing to take on that responsibility.

I think there are real dangers to escalating military conflict with ISIS, and we need to be aware of them. But at the same time, you have to understand, you know, that this whole thing started with Bashar al-Assad and how he is the one who continued to escalate against the people of Syria who were trying to get democratic reform.

The Middle East is more angry than ever. I'm afraid that the sort of deceit on the route to war was linked to the lack of preparation for afterwards and the chaos and suffering that continuous - so it won't go away will it?

President Obama knows that wars are not to be entered into lightly; he knows that overseas conflicts don't only do damage in the land in which they are fought, but in the land of those who fight them, as well.

It's not the job of the U.S. military to do nation-building or produce democratic utopias.

Every war has revolutionary justice.

It is one thing to be against unilateralism and against nonhumanitarian interventionism - but it is quite another thing to be against humanitarian interventionism.

I have known war as few men now living know it. It's very destructiveness on both friend and foe has rendered it useless as a means of settling international disputes.

I'm not a wide-eyed imperialist who wants to see Americans manning outposts all over the world. Not outposts to freedom in the cold war cliche, but islands of stability and seas of ethnic strife. That is not what anyone should feel comfortable seeing Americans doing.

Sure we won the war, but the peace we’re losing badly.

In general our officers are humane. But in some cases they have carried on your warfare with a mixture of American ingenuity and Castilian cruelty.

Such recognition is not necessary in order to enable the United States to intervene and pacify the Island.

If American lives must end, and American treasure be spilled, in countries we barely know, that is the price that change has demanded of conviction and of our enduring covenant.

I think every day we look at the mess of the chaos of the civil war in Iraq, I think every day people become more and more convinced that the war was a mistake. I think we have to learn from the mistakes of our past.

I do believe that if there is some way that we can find a diplomatic way to address the atrocities in Syria, I think that we should move forward with all due speed to make sure that it is something that is credible.

The Great Seal was an early proclamation of 'humanitarian intervention,' to use the currently fashionable phrase.

Assad has to go. I mean, the way that ISIS can recruit, and the rebels that are in the north, and all the chaos that's happening through a lot of Syria circles around a lot of people that do not like Assad.

I'm not willing to commit American taxpayers' money anymore or American troops on the ground in another Middle Eastern country.

When you look at where the Democratic field is going relative to foreign policy, they are increasingly moving away from a policy of pre-emptive self-defense that the president has adopted since September 11.

We, Britain and Germany, can neither of us be happy about our handling of the Iraq war.

Syrian influence has not ended yet. It is going to be a very long path.

As I watch what is happening in the Middle East and the carnage that comes over our television screens every evening, I cannot help but ask myself, what is wrong with humankind that we cannot stop the killing?

The world is a better place with Saddam Hussein gone.

The humanitarian would, of course, have us meddle in foreign affairs as part of his program of world service.

For the security of the UK, it matters a lot for Somalia to become a more stable place.