Paul Wolfowitz Quotes
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The American people are pretty impressive in their ability to keep after something if they think it is doable.
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One of the things that ultimately led me to leave mathematics and go into political science was thinking I could prevent nuclear war.
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For one thing I tend not to see myself in various moulds that people fit me into.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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I told my father I had to try political science for a year. He thought I was throwing my life away.
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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.
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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.
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After a regime is removed, however, it is dangerous to leave a security vacuum.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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I like globalization; I want to say it works, but it is hard to say that when six hundred million people are slipping backwards.
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The only way you can be comfortable about Donald Trump's foreign policy, is to think he doesn't really mean anything he says.
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I'm constantly asking for alternative views on most things that come to me.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Jobs are a priority for every country. Doing more to improve regulation and help entrepreneurs is the key to creating jobs - and more growth.
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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.
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If a cat sits on a hot stove once, it will never sit on a cold one either.
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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.
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To stay back from an intervention is not always a good solution.
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People change their habits. I know Americans who don't go to Paris because they think it is too dangerous.
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Iraq has no history of ethnic conflict.
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Every math curriculum in the world is based on the idea of hand-calculating, and most of what you're teaching is how to calculate. And I think the resistance to this is very variable.
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History is just littered with problems that were solved that were supposed to be impossible.
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For the private sector to flourish, special privilege must give way to equal opportunity and equal risk for all.
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People seem to forget that Saddam was the only leader in the world who praised the attacks of 9/11 as a good thing.
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