Chuck Hagel Quotes

I have no doubt that our military would decisively defeat Iraq’s forces and remove Saddam. But like the proverbial dog chasing the car down the road, we must consider what we would do after we caught it. I am especially worried about the extreme difficulty of occupying Iraq with its history of autocratic rule, its balkanized ethnic tensions, and its isolated economic system. Our regime might be rejected by the Iraqi people, leading to civil unrest and even anarchy.

Military activities (are) not a role for the United States. There needs to be a number of steps that Maliki and his government must take to demonstrate that he is committed to an inclusive Iraq, something he has not done up to date.

There isn't any air power in the world that can take care of the problem of sectarian divisions.

There is little doubt that an unstable Syria will destabilize the whole Middle East.

So the idea that you could put Kurds, Shiite Arabs, and Sunni Arabs in a nice, liberal, federal system in Iraq in a short amount of time, six months or a year, boggles the mind.

It would have been disastrous for Zambia if we had gone multi-party because these parties would have been used by those opposed to Zambia's participation in the freedom struggle.

If Sudan starts to crumble, the shock waves will spread.

Iraq is falling apart.

Last chances in the Middle East have been two a dirham since the 1950s. Each year the enmities are more profound, the despots more bloodthirsty and clownish, the violence more extreme, and the conditions of ordinary existence more ghastly.

Sectarian politics gets votes in Iraq. But sectarian government fails in Iraq.

The Lebanese Civil War, 1975-1990, spanned four World Cups. It would have been a more symmetrical five had the Lebanese begun in 1974, but you know, we're Mediterranean, and timing isn't our forte.

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.

I also argued before the war that the administration was underestimating Arab nationalism and Iraqi nationalism, that it was not going to be as easy to rule Iraq as they thought.

The Iraqi war has transformed the Middle East.

If they make the deadline because the Shiites and Kurds essentially rammed a draft through over Sunni Arab objections, there will be hell to pay.

if you allow…for a civil war to happen between the Shiites and the Sunnis, Iraq is finished forever. It will be dismembered. It will not only be dismembered, it will cause so many conflicts in the region that it will bring the whole region into a turmoil that will be hard to resolve

I regret that on my arrival in Mesopotamia I was too much occupied with military matters, and too ill-informed regarding the political problem….[We had] a scratch and somewhat incongruous team of administrators with the majority possessing little exact knowledge of the people they were called upon to monitor

Saddam Hussein was not the cause of the problems of Iraq. He was the symptom of the problems of Iraq.

In beloved Iraq, blood is flowing between brothers, in the shadow of an illegitimate foreign occupation.

Western history shows that the current legitimacy crises in the Middle East is neither unprecedented in its gravity nor likely to resolve itself in any straightforward manner.

Egypt has a population of 90 million. If this country fails, the whole region will slide into a cycle of anarchy that will represent a grave danger to all countries in this region, including Israel, and would extend to Europe.

There will only be gridlock if the people you elect to office don’t want to help you.

The situation of any leader in the Middle East is not easy.

The Sunni militants that make up ISIS are not the underlying problem in Syria and Iraq, but rather they are a symptom of other deeper problems.

You know the Middle East is going crazy when Lebanon is the most peaceful place in the region.