Conflict Outcome Quotes

You can kill ten of my men for every one I kill of yours, but even at those odds, you will lose and I will win.

A war with so little chance of success should not be fought.

In the first six to twelve months of a war with the United States and Great Britain I will run wild and win victory upon victory. But then, if the war continues after that, I have no expectation of success.

War is not won by victory.

The U.S. never lost a battle against North Vietnam, but it lost the war.

As the result of two successful campaigns, of the employment of an enormous force, and of the expenditure of large sums of money, all that has yet been accomplished has been the disintegration of the [Afghan] State … and a condition of anarchy throughout the rest of the country.

The concern is that Iraq could actually ultimately defeat ISIS, but Iran will have taken over the country, because it will be their military, their boots on the ground controlling the ground.

We can, for example, be fairly confident that either there will be a world without war or there won't be a world - at least, a world inhabited by creatures other than bacteria and beetles, with some scattering of others.

War does not determine who is right - only who is left.

Two great and terrible truths of war are these: War is easy to enter into, but difficult to end. And ultimately, in war there are no winners.

Taking stock of 'Operation Iraqi Freedom' a decade later, the Financial Times concluded that the US won the war, Iran won the peace, and Turkey won the contracts. I can only agree.

None of the people's wars of the sixties did very well, including the one in Vietnam. Vo Nguyen Giap himself has admitted a loss of 600,000 men between 1965 and 1968...Moreover, by about 1970 at least 80% of the day-to-day combat in South Vietnam was being carried on by regular NVA troops...Genuine black-pajama southern guerrillas had been decimated and amounted to no more than 20% of the communist fighting forces.

The stakes in conflict do not change. Battle determines who will control the wealth or its equivalent.

Mrs. [Indira] Gandhi can rightly boast of having won a war, but if she won it, she should first of all thank Yahya Khan and his gang of illiterate psychopaths.

I was lucky enough to lead a very successful war.

I think that most Americans feel that the Indians lost because of fair fights and superior odds and superior weaponry. That's because that's the only side of the story that's been told.

The day of reckoning is not just coming for Saddam Hussein. It's coming for the anti-war movement.

I don't know what happens if they get bin Laden. I'm much more interested in what happens if they don't get bin Laden.

You assume things, like whatever country has more firepower wins the wars, and that's actually not true at all.

When we analyze this war in a materialistic way and ask when is it going to end and who will be the winner and the loser, it means that we do not see the endgame.

It is simply not true that war never settles anything.

Whichever side looses is horrified at the outcome.

My own view of this, by the way, is, if the war on terrorism is successful over time, in its own way it's going to box Saddam in in a way that's going to make it much more difficult for him to maintain his power, and that he's going to become increasingly isolated. I think that's going to take time.

Johnny Apple, a New York Times correspondent, wrote a front-page story saying Afghanistan could be a quagmire and he was mocked and derided. What is certainly true is that all sorts of resources that would have been used in Afghanistan were diverted to Iraq. Would those resources have helped? Almost undoubtedly. Whether or not Afghanistan would be a peaceful nation-state had we not gone into Iraq I doubt. Afghanistan is going to be Afghanistan, no matter how hard we try to make it something else.

I personally think that today, Iraq without Saddam Hussein is a truly better Iraq than with Saddam Hussein. But, naturally, I also feel uncomfortable due to the fact that we were misled with the information on weapons of mass destruction.