American Involvement Quotes

I'm not an apologist for Iran's actions. Iran certainly has supported activities of terrorism, and the Houthis don't have clean hands. The Houthis have engaged in crimes too. But the idea that that justifies American involvement in a civil war in Yemen doesn't make any sense strategically.

We are not about to send American boys 9 or 10 thousand miles away from home to do what Asian boys ought to be doing for themselves.

I think Americans are aware that they are involved in all sorts of violence around the world. They normally don't want to look at that.

Let me make my point about Vietnam. When the Nixon initiation came into office, there were 550,000 Americans in combat. And ending the war was not a question of turning off a television channel. And so, debating on how we got there and what judgments were made was not going to help us.

You must come into the war if you are to survive.

Terrorism, too, must be excised wherever it exists, which will take years, and which can't happen without the total commitment and the everyday involvement of the American people.

There is going to be no involvement of America in war unless it is the result of the Constitutional process that is placed upon Congress to declare it.

We must wait and see what he (FDR) does next. At the moment, there is no talk of war. He does not dare.

South Vietnam is now undergoing an acute crisis of confidence. The United States must demonstrate by deeds—not merely words—the American commitment seriously to help save Vietnam. To be persuasive, this commitment must include the sending to Vietnam of some U. S. military forces.

They are all a rotten lot. Schmidt and the Americans and we are the only people who would do any standing up and fighting if necessary.

Before America entered the war [WW2] I knew we could not win it, but after she entered I knew we could not lose

Saigon was an addicted city, and we were the drug: the corruption of children, the mutilation of young men, the prostitution of women, the humiliation of the old, the division of the family, the division of the country-it had all been done in our name. . . . The French city . . . had represented the opium stage of the addiction. With the Americans had begun the heroin phase.

I am not suggesting that all those missionary organizations working in Haiti should pack up and go home, but I am urging them to understand that Haiti does not need clever Americans with newly contrived schemes for saving their country.

It was quite a European war until 1917, when the Americans joined up. They don't have the same sense of the loss of innocence and the cataclysmic loss of life. A whole generation was wiped out.

I'm not necessarily opposed to greater American involvement. But if that's the way the Mexican government wants to go, it needs to come clean about it. Just look at what we learned from Iraq. Secrecy led to malfeasance. It led to corrupt contracting.

From Britain's point of view the 1939 war had been a liberal war which had been entered into in a condition of moral indignation without the resources to fight it, that it had been providential good fortune which had placed the burden of fighting on the Russians and the Americans.

I should drag in the United States.

The majority of Afghans do not see the Americans as foreign occupiers who must be defeated. Instead, they are hungry for the Americans to step up and help them make their country safer, their government cleaner and their economy stronger. They are disappointed because the international community has done too little, not too much.

No Americans may be involved in any operations partaking of a military character in Indonesia

I think in many ways, the Spanish Civil War was the first battle of World War II. After all, where else in the world at this point did you have Americans in uniform who were being bombed by Nazi planes four years before the U.S. entered World War II? Hitler and Mussolini jumped in on the side of Francisco Franco and his Spanish nationalists, sent them vast amounts of military aid, airplanes, tanks - and Mussolini sent 80,000 ground troops as well - because they wanted a sympathetic ally in power. So I think it really was the opening act of World War II.

If there was ever a just war since the world began, it is this in which America is now engaged.

Major international interventions are doomed unless the US is directly or indirectly involved. But if American politicians, officials and servicemen are to be put at risk of arrest and prosecution, the United States will be most reluctant to act in order to curb aggression or prevent genocide. So the effect of the court may well be to diminish, not increase, the numbers of (in the words of the UN Secretary General) 'innocents of distant wars and conflicts'.

There is a hunger for the United States to be present again.

Our history with Americans goes back over 80 years. They came here, they helped us harness our oil and gas, and we became leaders.

Do you know why I won the last elections? It was because the people liked me, yes, because I had worked, yes, but also because the opposition had behaved badly toward me. And do you know why I won this war? Because my army was able to do it, yes, but also because the Americans were on the side of Pakistan.