As many critics have pointed, out, terrorism is not an enemy. It is a tactic. Because the United States itself has a long record of supporting terrorists and using terrorist tactics, the slogans of today's war on terrorism merely makes the United States look hypocritical to the rest of the world.
Acts of terror have never brought down liberal democracies. Acts of parliament have closed a few.
I have never belonged to a party. I don't have party affiliation.
Second, recent polls over there show that the majority of Iraqis want us to leave precipitously.
Firing off 1,000 or 500 or 2,000 nuclear warheads on a few minutes' consideration has always struck me as an absurd way to go to war.
So the idea that you could put Kurds, Shiite Arabs, and Sunni Arabs in a nice, liberal, federal system in Iraq in a short amount of time, six months or a year, boggles the mind.
While people out there on the spot certainly have to be held accountable for what they've done personally, the chain of command responsibility for this strikes me as just as important and should be dealt with.
I will make a general statement that we have not had anything like the policy of holding people in high office responsible for their acts that I think we should.
Once we destroyed the Saddam regime, we knew there was going to be a civil war.
In World War II in Germany, we had a ration for one U.S. soldier, or one allied soldier for every twenty inhabitants. The ratio in Iraq is about one for a hundred and sixty.
I remember serving in Vietnam in that war, and many of us at the major Lieutenant Colonel, colonel level were frustrated that no one in the U.S. wanted to debate it that way.
Military officers from different countries, when they meet each other, tend to sort of fall in love, become mutual admiration societies, at the expense of realities.
The whole notion of land property rights in the Arab world is different from that in Europe.
I've decided that the political context is such that the only way reform will finally come about in the Russian military is that the deterioration goes beyond the point to which these old generals can stand up there and resist it.
To say that you now trust the Russian military command and control system because some Russian general told you from the bottom of his heart that's the case, strikes me as most unrealistic.
In reality, I don't think that many of the policies we've attempted to apply to deal with it are going to have any serious effect.
The presidents I served under don't have anything to do with my politics.
