Barbara Boxer Quotes

This is a very difficult assignment for the United States, to hang in there and help this young democracy survive.

I don't think it's the job of the United States to build democracies from whole cloth. That's Wilsonianism to me of the most crazy kind.

The United States must learn to rebuild states after overturning their regimes.

Vietnam presumably taught us that the United States could not serve as the world's policeman; it should also have taught us the dangers of trying to be the world's midwife to democracy when the birth is scheduled to take place under conditions of guerrilla war.

I was never convinced that war was the best system to bring democracy to the country.

The United States can't impose democracies. We can't impose our will. The Russians found that out in Afghanistan.

I think we need to just be very clear about what we're trying to do in Afghanistan. Frankly, we're not trying to create the perfect democracy. We're never going to create some ideal society. We are simply there for our own national security.

The U.S. cannot impose freedom, security, and unity in Iraq by force.

In the end, it's a good investment for America to be involved in helping people get democratic governance - not to take over their country - but to help people be free. And that is an investment that will pay off in the future.

The United Nations should come in and take over Liberia, not temporarily, but for life. To make Liberians believe in democracy, to make us believe in human rights, they need to go in and just seize control of the country. That is the only way Liberia will ever become the kind of country it was supposed to be.

No matter how many troops we have in place or how long they stay, we cannot impose a parliamentary democracy there any more than the insurgents can impose a theocracy.

Our country is being bled daily in an effort to create a democracy in a place where it never existed.

You’re going to have to occupy Iraq for years and years. The idea that democracy will suddenly blossom is something that I can’t share...Are Americans ready for this?

Establishing a stable democracy is a two stage process. First you get rid of the old regime, then you build a durable democratic replacement. Because the first stage is dramatic, many people think the game is over when the dictator is gone. But the second stage is more difficult. There are many examples of broad coalitions coming together to oust dictators but relatively few of them stayed together and agreed on what a new regime should look like.

We could do good things in Afghanistan for the next 100 years and fail.

To me, what success looks like is not to believe that Afghanistan can become a unified, Western-style democracy with a developed-country economy just yet. I think success in the American interest is some level of assurance that it's not going to be a place that again leads to an attack on the American homeland.

The Bush administration has created an unimaginable catastrophe in Iraq. This should've been one of the easiest military occupations in history and they succeeded in turning it into one of the worst military disasters in history. They can't control it and it's almost impossible for them to get out for reasons you can't discuss in the United States because to discuss the reasons why they can't get out would be to concede the reasons why they invaded.

We are not going to be able to rebuild Afghanistan into a Jeffersonian democracy.

We could not bring democracy to South Vietnam at a cost that we were willing to accept. So it was a disaster. That' is the left extreme.

A great deal remains to be done in Afghanistan and the jury is out as to whether the international community has the commitment and the patience to see the rebuilding process through.

In Afghanistan, legitimate authority has been traditionally highly localized, a product of consensus rather than brute force, and firmly anchored in tribal, clannish, and kinship structures.

We toppled the Taliban government in Afghanistan without thinking of what is next.

The Bush Administration went into the Middle East thinking it was spreading democracy. Instead they spread sectarianism.

The concepts of "democracy promotion" and "transformational diplomacy" pursued by the George W. Bush Administration conditioned interstate relations on altering any system of government that did not match Washington's understanding of democracy.

Whatever they did for democracy, the U.S. interventions in the Middle East and the vaunted Arab Spring have proved to be pure hell for Arab Christians.