Chuck Hagel Quotes

The Iraq War is an incredibly strategic blunder of enormous proportions …. There was not an exit strategy because the people planning this war didn’t intend to leave.

Anyone who has ever studied the history of American diplomacy, especially military diplomacy, knows that you might start in a war with certain things on your mind as a purpose of what you are doing, but in the end, you found yourself fighting for entirely different things that you had never thought of before ... In other words, war has a momentum of its own and it carries you away from all thoughtful intentions when you get into it. Today, if we went into Iraq, like the president would like us to do, you know where you begin. You never know where you are going to end.

The historic lesson is that it was a strategic failure to go into Iraq. History will not be and should not be kind with that decision.

The conduct of President Bush's war of choice has been plagued with incompetent civilian leadership decisions that have cost many lives and rendered the war on and occupation of Iraq a strategic policy disaster for the United States.

I had arrived years ago in Paris and just wanted to be famous, fast. When you're pretentious like that, and you think you've planned everything perfectly, it's then that everything goes in the opposite way.

We also can't try to take over and rebuild every country that falls into crisis. That's not leadership; that's a recipe for quagmire, spilling American blood and treasure that ultimately weakens us. It's the lesson of Vietnam, of Iraq - and we should have learned it by now.

Today, war of necessity is used by critics of military action to describe unavoidable response to an attack like that on Pearl Harbor that led to our prompt, official declaration of war, while they characterize as unwise wars of choice the wars in Korea, Vietnam and the current war in Iraq.

The cause of our difficulties in southeast Asia is not a deficiency of power but an excess of the wrong kind of power which results in a feeling of impotence when it fails to achieve its desired ends.

A democracy is severely restricted in its use of armed forces as a weapon of peacetime foreign policy. It cannot manipulate them tactically on any extensive scale for the accomplishment of measures short of war.

He knows nothing; and he thinks he knows everything. That points clearly to a political career.

You have wasted six hundred millions of treasure. You have sacrificed nearly ten thousand American lives—the flower of our youth. You have devastated provinces. You have slain uncounted thousands of the people you desire to benefit.

My generals are always right about other people’s wars and wrong about our own.

Both Republicans and Democrats want to use our children as cannon fodder in order to police the world.

You have landed in Egypt, thinking to take possession of it. You have imagined that it was only peopled with cowards ! you who are a drum filled with wind….The death of the servants of the Messiah has been the reward given to you by God….What now remains of the seventy thousand who accompanied you? Dead, wounded, and prisoners !

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

The arrogance of those in charge of the Pentagon and in Baghdad was as limitless as their ignorance …

A fatal mistake in war is to underrate the strength, feeling and resources of an enemy.

All wars are mishandled.

Theories and grand ideas are important, but they seldom unfold as planned.

The next time some neocon, demanding whatever military intervention neocons are demanding that day, invokes Hitler or Munich or appeasement, lock up your silver.

It is alarming that military intervention in internal conflicts in foreign countries has become commonplace for the United States. Is it in America’s long-term interest? I doubt it. Millions around the world increasingly see America not as a model of democracy but as relying solely on brute force, cobbling coalitions together under the slogan “you’re either with us or against us.”

… our record in predicting where we will use military force over the last 40 years has been perfect. We have never once gotten it right.

Every time we have toppled a secular dictator (in the Middle East), it has been replaced by a chaos and the rise of radical Islam…. Intervention has unintended consequences

Robert McNamara’s greatest flaw was his belief that if there was a problem, there had to be an answer.

Thinking you know when in fact you don't is a fatal mistake, to which we are all prone