John Abizaid Quotes

We in Congress need to support the American forces in every conceivable way, giving them the tools to continue to convert, capture or kill terrorists and the time to equip the Iraqi security forces.

Operations in Iraq and Afghanistan and the war on terrorism have reduced the pace of military transformation and have revealed our lack of preparation for defensive and stability operations. This Administration has overextended our military.

When you talk about aiding this country against that country or about fighting terrorism, when you actually take that decision and strip it down, it always comes down to one person in the field giving specialized training to somebody else in the field.

The U.S. spent billions of dollars to build a secular, professional national Iraqi army but failed because, despite all the U.S.-supplied guns, tanks and planes, the Iraqi military fell apart when challenged by a band of terrorists.

We could have prevented the terrorist attack on the Boston Marathon if we had 20,000 troops shoulder to shoulder.

If I had been in President Obama's shoes, I would have acted more decisively and strongly against ISIS.

Prior to the PATRIOT Act, the ability of government agencies to share information with each other was limited, which kept investigators from fully understanding what terrorists might be planning and to prevent their attacks.

Then we can help these failed states turn around and give their people a better life. This, too, is a critical part of this global war on terrorism, and Canada and the United States are together.

The Pakistani government under Musharraf is a strong and key player in the global war on terrorism, and their contribution has been second to none.

On average, since 9/11, the FBI reckons that just over 100,000 terrorism leads each year have come over the transom. Analysts and agents designate them as immediate, priority or routine, but the bureau says every one is covered.

The training and equipping of Iraqi security forces should be accelerated.

While I agree that homegrown terrorism and the jihadist threat deserve continuing attention, a single-minded approach ignores all other threats.

And we need to maintain our foothold in the fight against terrorism and terrorist groups and respond to any degradation of Iraqi security or stability.

The Egyptian military and the government of Israel have long had a common interest in maintaining order and fighting terrorism in Sinai.

No Spanish government has given into terror and no government will do that.

We need spies that look like their targets, CIA officers who speak the dialects terrorists use, and FBI agents who can speak to Muslim women who might be intimidated by men.

More terrorists and extremists have been captured or killed in Pakistan than in any place in the world.

We can fight the War on Terrorism in other places around the world or we can fight it here in America. The right choice is to fight those terrorists where they are.

The Obama administration has vastly expanded the use of armed drones and concentrated a great deal of diplomatic effort on building and maintaining alliances that share information about terrorists, provide access to get near them, and then strike against them.

Able Danger was a top-secret military planning operation, established in '99 by the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff to identify cells of al-Qaida worldwide and to take out al Qaida terrorists. They identified five cells worldwide, one of them in Brooklyn.

If you want to know what a terrorist is doing, you have to put an agent in their camp.

If we announced threats [to airlines and flights] as we received them, we would be catering to the terrorists' goals.

I don’t think one can speak of defeating the IRA, of eliminating them completely, but it is the design of the security forces to reduce their level of violence to something like an acceptable level.

The open-ended nature of the struggle against it means that the war on terrorism, unlike conventional wars, cannot be viewed as a passing emergency. That fact has important implications for the debate about how much liberty we should give up so the government can fight terrorism more effectively. Since there’s now way of knowing when the war is over – no territory to occupy, no surrender to accept – any sacrifices we make are likely to be permanent.

The force that we went to war with after 9-11 was a force designed for the Cold War. We have much different needs today.