We did not go to war in Afghanistan or in Iraq to, quote, 'impose democracy.' We went to war in both places because we saw those regimes as a threat to the United States.
There's a lot of money to pay for this ... the oil revenues of that country could bring between $50 and $100 billion over the course of the next two or three years...We're dealing with a country that can really finance its own reconstruction, and relatively soon.
We are already seeing a degree of instability in the world because Obama seems to have consciously wanted to step back. Donald Trump is going to be "Obama squared," a more extreme version of the same thing.
The use of force to liberate people is very different from the use of force to suppress or control them, or even to defeat them.
It would be a huge mistake to abandon democracy promotion. Peaceful political change has been enormously successful in the past years in Eastern European countries as well as in countries like South Korea, South Africa, Chile and Indonesia. However, if possible, the use of force is something to avoid except in cases where genocide is threatened, like Bosnia or Libya or with regimes that threaten our security, like the Taliban and Saddam Hussein.
China, in the future, is going to have even more nuclear capability than it has had in the past. I don't believe that they have anything to fear from the United States, and I frankly don't believe they do fear the United States.
To stay back from an intervention is not always a good solution.
It's hard to conceive that it would take more forces to provide stability in post-Saddam Iraq than it would take to conduct the war itself and secure the surrender of Saddam's security forces and his army. Hard to imagine.
If a cat sits on a hot stove once, it will never sit on a cold one either.
Sometimes corruption is slowed by shedding light into what was previously shadowed.
Iraq has no history of ethnic conflict.
Saddam Hussein had nerve gas and used it against his own people, he had used chemical weapons against the Iranians and he almost had a nuclear bomb in 1981 and in 1991. And he had been caught with anthrax in 1995 by the UN inspections after denying that he had it.
For the private sector to flourish, special privilege must give way to equal opportunity and equal risk for all.
The Western alliance should have supported the Sunni opposition against the Assad regime from the beginning. As far as Iraq is concerned, if it had stayed stable the way it was in 2008, IS would not have been able to expand in Iraq the way they did. The mistake was that Barack Obama withdrew the armed forces from Iraq too fast.
I certainly think it's important to speak up and say how unacceptable Donald Trump is. I'm always more than willing to do that.
I think one has to say it's not just simply a matter of capturing people and holding them accountable, but removing the sanctuaries, removing the support systems...
I think it's a mistake to rely too much on any one economic factor. It's why investors try to spread their portfolio round.
The most striking thing is that even before Osama bin Laden was killed, he seemed largely irrelevant to the Arab Spring.
NATO is still the most remarkable alliance in history. It stuck together through 40 years of Cold War, and it then joined together to fight in Afghanistan. In the 1980s, I would not have thought this was going to be possible.
I like globalization; I want to say it works, but it is hard to say that when six hundred million people are slipping backwards.
I wish there were somebody I could be comfortable voting for. I might have to vote for Hillary Clinton, even though I have big reservations about her.
I don't know of a single instance of these Arab freedom fighters holding up pictures of bin Laden. I know many instances of them displaying American flags in Benghazi or painting 'Facebook' on their foreheads in Cairo. The idea of freedom . . . is absolutely contradictory to what bin Laden stood for, which was . . . taking Muslims back to some medieval theocracy and encouraging people to die not for freedom but to go to paradise and to kill innocent people along the way. The contrast is really striking.
That sense of what happened in Europe in World War II has shaped a lot of my views.
The American people are pretty impressive in their ability to keep after something if they think it is doable.
Firing employees, that's unfortunately part of doing business.
