Donald Trump Quotes

The question becomes what kind of coalition can we build that will make a transition and empower the people of Iraq? The American soldiers' presence there is an act of provocation. There's a big red ball on the back of every American soldier in that country, so our being there contributes to the crisis, it does not resolve the crisis.

I think that all countries of the region should join their efforts in the fight against a common threat - terrorism in general and ISIS in particular. It concerns Iran as well, it concerns Saudi Arabia (although the two countries do not get along very well, ISIS threatens both of them), it concerns Jordan, it concerns Turkey (in spite of certain problems regarding the Kurdish issue), and, in my opinion, everybody is interested in resolving the situation. Our task is to join these efforts to fight against a common enemy.

The rise of ISIS in Iraq is a wider threat to the stability of the Middle East and the West than many realise.

It is in American and Afghan interests for the U.S. to stay in Afghanistan so it doesn't turn into Iraq circa 2014, with the Taliban controlling much of the country while hosting a strong presence of ISIS and al-Qaeda as well as every other jihadist group of note.

Local Arab partners and the Iraqi government must lead the fight against ISIL. U.S. military advisers are important to this effort, but we cannot be engaged in combat operations. That is why Congress must revoke the previous war authorization and define our appropriate role in defeating ISIL.

In practice, the U.K.'s most consistent strategic objective in relation to Iraq was to reduce the level of its deployed forces.

We have accomplished our mission of stopping Iraq's drive to take over Saudi Arabia and the rest of the Middle East. We should begin to reduce our forces in Saudi Arabia, ever so slowly, and look to a more multinational force to keep the peace.

We don't have enough American troops inside of Iraq to destroy ISIL any time soon.

We need a strategy to destroy ISIS there. You can't do that without the cooperation of the Muslim world because they're as threatened as we are.

The White House was so eager to rid itself of Iraq that it was willing to withdraw rather than lock in arrangements that would preserve our influence and interests.

I hope by the time I am president that we will have pushed ISIS out of Iraq.

If we topple [Bashar] Assad, the result will be ISIS will take over Syria, and it will worsen U.S. national security interests.

Iran is the only country around the negotiating table that has not been attacked by either al-Qaida or Daesh.

Many countries that formerly saw Israel as an enemy now see Israel as a potential partner in addressing their primary security challenges. And so first and foremost, Iran. The rise of Iran, the empowerment of Iran has created a big change in the dynamics in the region. The second was the rise of ISIS.

George W. Bush made the agreement about when American troops would leave Iraq, not Barack Obama.

We cannot tolerate a nuclear Iran. It would be a game changer. Not only would it threaten Israel, a country that is our stalwart ally, but it would also create an environment in which you could set off an arms race in this Middle East.

ISIS is a radical jihadist group that is increasingly sophisticated in its ability, for example, to radicalize American citizens, in its inability to exploit loopholes in our legal immigration system, in its ability to capture and hold territory in the Middle East, as I outlined earlier, in multiple countries.

There is no one else at all who is fighting ISIS on the ground, except for President al-Assad's army.

Glossed over the disastrous war and its multibillion-dollar price tag and implied again that our presence in Iraq is somehow improving the situation in that chaotic and turbulent country. The Congress must stand up against Bush's plan to escalate the war.

We're making progress. Our military is assisting in Iraq. And we're hoping that within the year we'll be able to push ISIS out of Iraq and then, you know, really squeeze them in Syria.

We should have never let ISIS happen in the first place. And right now, they're in 32 countries.

I'm sorry, there was an effort on the part of the president to have a status of forces agreement, and I concurred in that, and said that we should have some number of troops that stayed on. That was something I concurred with.

Today, I can report that, as promised, the rest of our troops in Iraq will come home by the end of the year.

Iraq is a very important part of securing the homeland, and its a very important part of helping change the Middle East into a part of the world that will not serve as a threat to the civilized world, to people like - or to the developed world, to people like - in the United States.

The only way that American troops could have stayed in Iraq is to get an agreement from the then-Iraqi government that would have protected our troops, and the Iraqi government would not give that.