Barack Obama Quotes

What I've learned, and will try to remember from now on, is that defending your country's credibility is never sufficient reason to fight a war.

I ran in 2006 as an opponent of the Iraq War, and I came to Congress to change overreliance on U.S. military power.

I think that the decision to go to war in Iraq was a mistake.

Barak Obama initially opposed [war in Libia].

I'm not sure that Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama know that we're at war.

She [Hillary Clinton] wants to start an air war over Syria with Russia, a nuclear-armed power.

We will not really address our foreign policy and these endless wars that show no end in sight and seem to be getting deeper and broader and more catastrophic with each passing day.

These aren't joyous times when we have war in Iraq. These are challenging times, and they're difficult times, and they're straining the psyche of our country. I understand that.

Libya, more than anyone else's war, was Hillary Clinton's war. Barak Obama initially opposed it. Who was the person championing it? Hillary Clinton. That's documented throughout her emails.

President Vladimir Putin continues to call for new peace plans as his troops roll through the Ukrainian countryside and he absolutely ignores every agreement that his country has signed in the past and he has signed recently, we, the United States, and Europe as a whole, have to stand with Ukraine at this moment. Ukraine needs our financial assistance and support as it pursues reforms and even in the face, in the face of this military onslaught.

, I'm going to reserve judgment on [Rex] Tillerson. But I'll ask him the same question I've asked the others: do you understand the historic lesson that the Iraq war was a failure, a strategic mistake, that's what Donald Trump says.

Unlike Hillary Clinton, who voted for the war without knowing what she was doing, I would not have had our people in Iraq. Iraq was disaster.

I should have voted for the first Iraq war. George Bush did that one very well. I had been skeptical. I was afraid that George Bush was going to treat the first Iraq war the way his son treated the second.

I'm sure it is, I'm not for any kind of war, we've been engaged in several wars since the second world war and we lost in Korea, we lost in Vietnam, they are political wars, they have nothing to do with any real threat, nor does this one.

War on terrorism defines the central preoccupation of the United States in the world today, and it does reflect in my view a rather narrow and extremist vision of foreign policy of the world's first superpower, of a great democracy, with genuinely idealistic traditions.

I believe in a strong national defense. But it's my belief that neither Iraq nor Afghanistan poses a threat to national security, and we shouldn't be involved in either area.

I used to have a little saying I used when people said, 'What are your priorities?' I'd give them a bit of government alphabet soup. I'd say 'CTCPROW: Counterterrorism, counterproliferation, rest of the world.'

Our opponent and many in Congress criticized our decision to end the Iraq war.

Our safety requires a long-term military presence in the Middle East because that's where the plans to attack us are emanating.

No American witnessing the way that President George W. Bush and his generals have bungled the Iraq war can deny that our leaders, civilian and military alike, will have to get a lot smarter if the U.S. armed services are to persuade the Islamic world to embrace the blessings of democracy.

I’d rather build highways here then try nation building in Iraq

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

Most people are disturbed by the shift from deterrence to preemption but the fact is that in international relations, deterrence has a poor track record

[George W. Bush is] … the most dangerous President in my lifetime.

America has wearied of Middle East War.