It's a very bad thing when people exterminate other people, and people persecute minorities.
I mean, we're going to probably debate the Iraq war for at least as long as I'm alive.
People change their habits. I know Americans who don't go to Paris because they think it is too dangerous.
People seem to forget that Saddam was the only leader in the world who praised the attacks of 9/11 as a good thing.
Look, I think the notion that theres a dogma or doctrine of foreign policy that gives you a textbook recipe for how to react to all situations is really nonsense.
The Bernie Sanders phenomenon shows that it's not confined to Republicans. There is a general sentiment that America is on the wrong track.
Poles understand perhaps better than anyone the consequences of making toothless warnings to brutal tyrants and terrorist regimes.
History is just littered with problems that were solved that were supposed to be impossible.
The absence of Saddam is a huge weight off the Arab world.
You cant win if youre chasing the wrong problem.
After a regime is removed, however, it is dangerous to leave a security vacuum.
Putin is behaving in a very dangerous way. And Donald Trump sounds as though he would simply sit back and allow that to go on. I worry about where that would end up.
Islamic State is mainly a direct result of the failure in Syria. That's where IS has grown. That's where IS spread from.
Our security depends on having good relationships with our allies. Donald Trump mainly shows contempt for them.
I think Obama sees everything through one lens. Doing nothing in the face of the slaughter in Syria is not only shameful, it is unrealistic. This approach leaves Syria as a broken country and a breeding ground for extremists for decades.
If the Arab world today looked like Tunisia, it would be a huge blow for the extreme ideologies. But Tunisia needs more support than it is getting, particularly from their close neighbors in Europe who have a great stake in North Africa.
Donald Trump seems to be unconcerned about the Russian aggression in Ukraine. By doing this he tells them that they can go ahead and do what they are doing. That is dangerous.
The only way you can be comfortable about Donald Trump's foreign policy, is to think he doesn't really mean anything he says.
I think all foreigners should stop interfering in the internal affairs of Iraq. Those who want to come and help are welcome. Those who come to interfere and destroy are not.
Public action should seek to expand the set of opportunities of those who have the least voice and fewest resources and capabilities.
There has been a good deal of comment — some of it quite outlandish — about what our postwar requirements might be in Iraq. Some of the higher end predictions we have been hearing recently, such as the notion that it will take several hundred thousand U.S. troops to provide stability in post- Iraq, are wildly off the mark. It is 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 to secure the surrender of Saddam's security forces and his army — hard to imagine.
One of the things that ultimately led me to leave mathematics and go into political science was thinking I could prevent nuclear war.
I told my father I had to try political science for a year. He thought I was throwing my life away.
The truth is that for reasons that have a lot to do with the U.S. government bureaucracy, we settled on the one issue that everyone could agree on, which was weapons of mass destruction, as the core reason.
I'm constantly asking for alternative views on most things that come to me.
