Xavier Becerra Quotes

Force undertaken as police action that turns into a real war is a distasteful shock to the politicians who expect that force can be used without injustice.

That was one of the great successes of removing Saddam Hussein, as we took Iraq out of the picture of having a sovereign nation from which the terrorists could operate. But this war has not gone perfectly.

It was essentially for self defence that we went to war in Afghanistan and would go to war in Iraq.

A devastating commentary on the war in Iraq is that we have been unable to spend money on infrastructure.

We make mistakes in every war and serious mistakes were made here.

I would not have gone into Iraq.

By the time the United States went to war with Afghanistan in the fall of 2001, I had made three trips to the country. I covered the fall of the Taliban in Kandahar and have been returning routinely for the past 14 years.

It would be immoral to walk away from the consequences of our actions, leaving behind anarchy and civil war in Iraq.

This war of choice in Iraq is undermining the very fabric of American society.

We are not at war with Egypt. We are in an armed conflict.

As many people have chronicled, the decision to fight in Vietnam was a years-long accretion of step-by-step choices, each of which could be rationalized at the time. Invading Iraq was an unforced, unnecessary decision to risk everything on a 'war of choice' whose costs we are still paying.

It was a mistake. On the information we had, we shouldn't have prosecuted the war. We shouldn't have changed our argument from international law to regime change in a non-transparent way. It was an error for which we as a country paid a heavy price, and for which many people paid with their lives.

If the president is going to use so much language of theology and the Bible, then let's use that language for a serious discussion about the war in Iraq. And that was never done.

Governments go to war directly or by proxy without declaring war. Force, or threat of force, are constantly used to dominate other countries.

I had earlier concluded that a war with Iraq would be a distraction from the successful and expeditious completion of our aims in Afghanistan. Now I had come to question whether the White House was telling the truth.

The real peril of war lies not in military defeat. It lies in war itself, whether we win or lose.

Waging an unnecessary war is a grave mistake.

'The war in Iraq - if Osama was a Christian - it's the Christmas present he never would have expected.

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.

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.

War is never fatal but always lost. Always lost.

Going to war against Iran - whether one calls such a move 'surgical' or 'total' - would be an extremely serious undertaking; with worldwide economic, military, diplomatic and human ramifications in both the short- and the long-term.

My level of cynicism about the reasons that took us to war against Iraq remain just as well-developed as they were before I went.

I care about politics just like any other citizen. I'm against the war in Iraq, or any type of war.

There are a growing number of conservatives and Republicans who, while they support the president and support the war in Iraq, wonder how many of these nation-building wars we're going to engage in and what the parameters of that are.