Lawrence Eagleburger Quotes (49 Quotes)

One nuclear war is going to be the last nuclear - the last war, frankly, if it really gets out of hand. And I just don't think we ought to be prepared to accept that sort of thing.

Now there is a cultural change under way in the Foreign Service.

Small- and medium-sized companies do not know what we have to offer and that needs to be changed. We must react just as strenuously on their behalf as we do for larger companies.

There's Hezbollah, there's Hamas, there is a whole range of terrorist targets out there related to Palestine and to Israel that we ought to be trying to deal with. And there's a great deal of targets in the Philippines, Indonesia. You name it, there are a number of places where there are targets that we ought to be trying to deal with.

The whole nuclear thing is a terrible mess and it's hard for me to understand why it is that we, the United States, seem to be the only ones that are really particularly concerned about it and prepared to do something.

In the end, while I thoroughly understand and totally supported President Bush's decision not to pursue Saddam personally, I am now prepared to admit that it was probably a mistake.

And beyond that, the next issue is how do we guarantee one of these weapons, not necessarily this missile, but nuclear weapons ends up in the hands of Al Qaeda or some other terrorist group.

Some day, somebody is going to have to start talking about what happens to us all a decade from now if we let these North Koreans and the Iranians go forward with their nuclear weapons program.

There is no question that Saddam has been a pain in the neck ever since,

Any Ambassador or Foreign Service Officer who has his or her head screwed on right knows that the U.S. position in the world is far more dependent on our ability to compete in world markets.

There is a natural partnership between State and Commerce, and the American business community to work together to educate the United States about marketing overseas.

In the best of all worlds everyone in the Embassy is doing something to assist U.S. exports.

There is no question in my mind that if given a chance, Saddam will again try to become the bully on the block in his part of the world.

One of the things that was clearly a part of the president's decision was that all of his generals were telling him it was time to leave,

We must advertise to U.S. business that we are there, that our attitude has changed, and that we care. When we are asked to help, we have to perform and provide the right advice.

Milosevic, who in my judgment is a liar and a thief and a scoundrel,

What we need is to develop in all Foreign Service Officers a better instinct for understanding the needs of U.S. business abroad.

I think, unless Saddam Hussein falls in a hole one day or somebody shoots him in the head, I personally think he is prepared to go down with his ship.

Those are two tough issues and they really go to the heart of what that country's going to be like, ... If the new Iraq is going to go into the 21st century at all sensibly and begin to make a difference in terms of the Muslim world, they're going to have to face that women's rights issue and they're going to have to get it right ... they can't go on treating them like second- or third-class citizens.

The fact of the matter is that if we were going to do anything about Gaddafi, it should have been at the beginning. And by fooling around like this as long as we have, we have wasted an opportunity that would have gotten rid of him.

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.

The point is, once they have a missile that can hit the United States, we are now back in the kind of game we used to worry about with the Soviet Union, only the Soviet Union was more mature about this whole thing than I think the North Koreans will be.

How long do we stay How much does it cost What does it do to our conditions within that part of the world What kind of a regime do we put in his place How long does it last if it seems that we are the ones that put him in his place

We have to spend a lot more time training people to be good advocates of U.S. business.

My father was somewhat to the right of Genghis Khan.

If I was to criticize the administration for anything, ... it is the general opinion people have in so many places around the world that the United States is so powerful now -- and the only superpower now -- that we can do almost anything we want.

My point here is I think international pressures of our acting unilaterally again are going to be such that the administration will say, well, we just can't take this on now.

That said, there is a tendency to help the large industrial conglomerate more quickly than the small company you have never heard of. That is something in the culture we are trying to change.

When you are in the presence of the president of the United States, I don't care if you've been a devout Democrat for the last hundred years, you're likely to pull your punches to some degree. Now, there was some criticism. But it was basically, you haven't talked to the American people enough. And it was very mild.

I believe that sooner or later we're going to have to deal with Saddam Hussein, because of his general reputation, because of what I'm convinced he's done with regard to terrorism and the support thereof. But I'm not at all sure I believe that it has to be right now.

I do not believe that you should have in the secretary of state someone who has spent their last four years in the White House next to the president,

I'm not sure very many people have had an opportunity to say anything about it,

What I can't quite see at this stage is that the evidence, even to the president, seems to be that clear. And if it is that clear, I can't understand why we are not capable of convincing our closest allies that given that evidence, they ought to join us in this effort.

If we had made it clear from the very beginning that we were not going to tolerate another nuclear power on the face of the earth, and had done it in Korea, where we could have accomplished it militarily, if necessary, I would put a stop to it and would have put a stop to it there.

There are sometimes problems for which there is no immediate solution, and there are sometimes problems for which there is no solution.

The consequence of a world full of nuclear powers to me is so incomprehensible in terms of the dangers that that implies.

There has been a major improvement in the way U.S. Ambassadors and the Foreign Service establishment try to assist U.S. business overall.

The question is not really about a shift to the economic cone where officers are writing about the balance of payments and the need for economic stabilization.

I think we have to be careful that it's clear we're dealing with him, but not to go so far that if he in fact sinks ... we sink along with him,

I think what he's - what he believes, and he may be correct, I don't know, that we have some intelligence information that leads us to know some things about what's going on in Iraq that we haven't revealed to others.

The question really is how do we get Embassy Officers into the minds of the American business community. That is a much more difficult task than understanding a statistical matrix.

The Foreign Service has spent 50 years concentrating on political and military affairs at a time when the U.S. economy was preeminent.

I didn't hear anyone making the argument very strenuously, quite frankly.

There are a lot of other terrorist targets we ought to be focusing on. Well, there is Syria, for example, which is pumping through - because of Iran, is pumping weapons on into Hezbollah and so forth - which is then producing a lot of agony in Palestine and in Israel. We ought to be doing a bit to try to stop that.

In a time of constrained resources we will have to shift emphasis. but not necessarily from the traditional Political Officer to the traditional Economic Officer.

Probably some of them don't believe it was a mistake, and for those who do ... people don't often like to admit they're wrong. I'm not even sure I'm right when I say it was a mistake.

We must institute more training to give Foreign Service Officers the skills to do what they must do in this new world of commercial competition.

Given the attitude of the French and the Germans, I don't think there's anything we can do that will convince them, because I don't think they want to be convinced.

What is more important is that Foreign Service Officers understand business, about the needs of U.S. business and how to help U.S. companies make the right connections abroad.