Mark McKinnon Quotes

If there is going to be a war – and no one can say that there is not – we must keep him fresh to be our war Prime Minister

The President has full responsibility, which cannot be shared, for military decisions in a world in which the difference between safety and cataclysm can be a matter of hours or even minutes.

Political considerations can be taken into account only as long as they do not make demands that are militarily improper or impossible.

Politics and war are remarkably similar situations.

I don't believe war is a way to solve problems. I think it's wrong. I don't have respect for the people that made the decisions to go on with war. I don't have that much respect for Bush. He's about war, I'm not about war - a lot of people aren't about war.

I thought that the administration needed bipartisan support, and I was for our commander-in-chief. Because I felt at that time it was the right thing do. If I knew then what I know now, I would have never voted for the war.

President Kennedy was willing to go to war. He was not a coward. The man had been in war and so had Ken O'Donnell. He was ready to protect this nation, but he was not ready for a military solution just because it was being rammed down his throat.

War is too serious a matter to be entrusted to generals.

Whenever we get involved in a war, the White House seems to have 3 priorities: We cannot appear to be losing; we must appear to be winning; we must look like we know what we are doing.

Every aspect of war is political.

When you are Commander in Chief, you should keep all your options on the table.

Domestic policy can only defeat us; foreign policy can kill us.

General Petraeus is not a miracle worker. He can not be successful unless the president creates greater confidence within his own team about the decisions which the president has himself made.

War is too serious a matter to leave to soldiers.

To delight in war is a merit in the soldier, a dangerous quality in the captain, and a positive crime in the statesman.

So with the end of the Cold War, it became increasingly obvious that there was no basis upon which any decision was being made, not in the White House, and certainly because of that, not in the Congress.

The most difficult idea to reconcile in war is the notion that anything is going to be solved by killing a stranger, or in risking your life for a cause anchored in some distant political arena.

You could argue that war is always an irrational act, and yet many states enter into military conflict out of rational calculation or national interest or the stability or longevity of their regime.

The Washington leadership has put aside non-proliferation programmes and devoted its energies and resources to driving the country to war by extraordinary deceit, then trying to manage the catastrophe it created in Iraq.

That was my first lesson from Ben-Gurion. Then I saw him making peace, and I saw him making war. He mobilized me before the war. The man was a very rare combination between a real intellectual and a born leader. There is a contradiction between the two.

There are a lot of things that have to be considered in National. The military aspect of it is only one of them. I'm confident that President Bush will have all of those things laid out for him before he makes the decision.

To go to war, you must always think of, can you win?

What a country calls its vital... interests are not things that help its people live, but things that help it make war.

Woe to the statesman whose reason for entering a war do not appear so plausible at its end as at its beginning.

The nation that will insist on drawing a broad line of demarcation between the fighting man and the thinking man is liable to have its fighting done by fools and its thinking done by cowards.