Sean Patrick Maloney Quotes

Russia isn't likely to have any more military success in Syria and Iraq than has the United States.

By God, we will make the fire eat up half of Isreal if it tries to do anything against Iraq.

Syria will remain a hotbed of terrorism as long as the civil war, aided and abetted by the Iranians and the Russians, continue.

It will take time to eradicate a cancer like Isil. And any time we take military action, there are risks involved - especially to the servicemen and women who carry out these missions. But I want the American people to understand how this effort will be different from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. It will not involve American combat troops fighting on foreign soil.

I would only go to Syria to destroy ISIS. I would not use U.S. troops to depose Assad. But I would support the rebels there. It's okay to support those people who share your view. But for the United States to be embroiled in a civil war in Syria against [Bashr] Assad I think is a big mistake.

I am deeply skeptical of re-entering into Iraq's civil war.

The question is the morning after. What sort of Iraq do we wake up to after the bombing? What happens in the region? What impact could it have? These are questions leaders I have spoken to have posed.

There is no doubt ISIS poses a clear, direct threat to the United States, and decisive action is badly needed.

The United States encouraged Iraqis to rise up after Saddam Hussein's army was driven out of Kuwait. Washington assumed Saddam was weak after losing the 1991 Gulf War. Iraqis rose up, but Saddam's troops killed thousands - Iraqis say tens of thousands - in a counter-offensive.

The Iranian acquisition of nuclear weapons would be infinitely more costly than any scenario you can imagine to stop it.

Iran's Ayatollah Khamenei and Assad are two sides of the same terror coin. Letting Assad continue to wield lethal power means that Tehran's terror network - from Hezbollah to the Houthis - will persist in threatening the West.

Yemen is a symbol of our continued military hubris in the Middle East - an addiction Obama was supposed to cure but didn't.

Iran has attacked oil fields and shot down a U.S. drone - all while we stood by.

Intervening militarily would exacerbate - not resolve - the matter and, in the process, will Americanize the Syrian civil war.

Obama has committed the U.S. to war on the Islamic State. To then allow within a month an allied enclave to be overrun - and perhaps annihilated - would be a major blow.

The entire Islamic world condemned Iran. Nowadays, because of the unwarranted invasion of Iraq by Bush and Blair, which was a completely unjust adventure based on misleading statements, and the lack of any effort to resolve the Palestinian issue, there is massive Islamic condemnation of the United States.

Whatever the history of U.S. intervention in Iraq, our priorities now should be to protect our people and defend our national security interests, not to try to resolve an intractable religious divide some 1,500 years in the making.

The war in Yemen is not a war that we wanted. We had no other option - there was a radical militia allied with Iran and Hezbollah that took over the country. It was in possession of heavy weapons, ballistic missiles and even an air force. Should we stand by idly while this happens at our doorstep, in one of the countries in which al-Qaida has a huge presence? So we responded, as part of a coalition, at the request of the legitimate government of Yemen, and we stepped in to support them.

Would the Iraq War have occurred without WMD? I doubt it.

The war against ISIS will pose many new challenges for the next commander-in-chief. The last two presidents [George W. Bush and Barack Obama] pursued a Middle East policy that supported toppling dictators to try to promote democracy.

What we have done is when the threat has been directed at the United States, i.e., the terrorist threat from ISIL or Al-Qaeda in Syria, is to go after them.

We're at war with the ISIS caliphate that sprang up because Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama precipitously withdrew all American forces from Iraq and created a vacuum of power, that ISIS was able to overrun vast territories that our soldiers had won in Operation Iraqi Freedom.

The idea that the United States is going to win the war in Iraq is just plain wrong.

Americans are at war with radical Islamic terrorism. We are at war with the ISIS caliphate, and what we need is a commander-in-chief who knows that, who understands that, who will give our military the resources they need to make that fight, pull our allies together - including moderate Arab nations - and hunt down and destroy ISIS and other terrorist organizations at their source.

We have been there for 15 years in the Middle East, and much more than that probably. And we have spent probably $4 trillion, maybe more than that. And it's time to do something about it. And it's time to also knock ISIS out. You got to knock ISIS out.