Andrew Bacevich Quotes (11 Quotes)

My view of his problem is that the administration has repeatedly announced that the war had reached a turning point ... and each time, that turning point didn't count. What he needs now is to be able to identify a real turning point in Iraq.

One wishes that he would say the problem is not simply a budgetary one. The problem is a structural one. The Republicans can properly fault the Clinton administration for giving so little attention to the restructuring of the post-Cold War force.

The US has a pretty good record of falling into this trap. The Bush administration has so overused the Hitler analogy that it's almost demeaning to history.

If this opens up so we have more and more officers speaking up and blaming Rumsfeld and blaming senior civilians, then it is possibly heading towards a fairly dangerous civilian-military crisis.

Rejection would be a disaster for the U.S., but ratification alone will not end our problems in Iraq. Even if the constitution is ratified, the insurgents are not going to lay down their arms.

It really does seem to me the war is stalemated in that the enemy, which has shown great resilience, cannot defeat us militarily, but neither do we have the capacity to eliminate the insurgency through military means.

The Latin American populists like Chavez have a very limited capacity to do anything that threatens substantial harm to our interests, so it's key in those cases not to overreact.

They weren't going to win the war, and if they left tomorrow, they wouldn't lose the war.

There is a strategy for the insurgency, which is 'get out'. There is not a strategy to respond to a civil war, as far as I can see.

There are people who view themselves on the Right, who were enthusiastic supporters of the war, who are now greatly concerned that the Bush administration or more in particular, the military, is losing its focus, its heart, and isn't fully committed, ... I think Bill Kristol ( search ) would be a good example of that.

How do we know it is really an Iraqi Army rather than a sectarian Army If it is not an Iraqi army, that really is going to put a damper on the notion of our drawing down forces.