David Petraeus Quotes
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Mubarak would meet with me when I was at Central Command. He would lean and put his hand on my knee, as if a father figure, and say, 'General, don't ever forget the Arab Street. Listen to the Arab Street.' I'd like to go to him now and say, 'Mr. President, what about that Arab Street, what's that all about?'
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When Western politicians propose blanket discrimination against Islam, they bolster the terrorists' propaganda.
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Ungoverned spaces in the Islamic world will be exploited by people who wish us ill. They will not be contained.
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Iraq is a country I came to know well and the place where I spent some of the most consequential years of my life.
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We cannot kill or capture our way out of an industrial-strength insurgency.
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Needless to say, it was the greatest of privileges to serve with the selfless men and women - Iraqi and American and those of our coalition partners, civilian as well as military - who did the hard, dangerous work of the surge. There seldom was an easy period; each day was tough.
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As we used to say when I was privileged to be the commander there, Nineveh province has the most diverse human terrain in all of Iraq - Sunni Arab majority to be sure, but also Shia Arabs, numerous Kurdish communities, and they are broken out into several different political parties.
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Iraq does have many, many different tensions.
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In counterinsurgency operations, the human terrain is the decisive terrain.
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The art of coalition command - whether it is here in Afghanistan, whether it was in Iraq or in Bosnia or in Haiti - is to take the resources you are provided with, understand what the strengths and weaknesses are and to employ them to the best overall effect.
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The central problem in Syria is that Sunni Arabs will not be willing partners against the Islamic State unless we commit to protect them and the broader Syrian population against all enemies, not just ISIS.
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The truth is that a number of us have been saying for quite some time that it was only a matter of time until someone went to a gun show, bought a military-like semi-automatic assault weapon with a large capacity magazine, and did enormous damage.
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Reconciliation is what takes place, of course, at higher levels. President Karzai has been very clear about the red lines for reconciliation, accept the constitution, lay down their weapons, cut their ties with al Qaeda and essentially become productive or at least participating members of society in that regard.
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The biggest of the big ideas that guided the strategy during the surge was explicit recognition that the most important terrain in the campaign in Iraq was the human terrain - the people - and our most important mission was to improve their security.
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At least from a national security standpoint, none of the problems the U.S. and U.K. face will become easier to solve if the U.K. is out of the E.U.; on the contrary, I fear that a 'Brexit' would only make our world even more dangerous and difficult to manage.
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I am not going to second-guess my old battlefield comrades from Iraq and Afghanistan; each has his own reason for what he has done.
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Needless to say, innumerable challenges exist in all areas of governance, and much more needs to be done to help the Afghan government assume full responsibility for addressing the concerns of ordinary Afghan citizens.
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In the 101st Airborne Division headquarters in Mosul, we had a sign on the wall. It was a question that we would ask ourselves before every new operation or policy initiative. It asked: Will this policy or operation take more bad guys off the streets than it creates by its conduct?
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We need to learn from our experiences and take responsibilities for our actions and drive on.
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We periodically note that there are no silver bullets, there are no magic formulas, there's no single action or component of the overall... comprehensive civil-military approach.
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Partners from the Islamic world are of particular importance. Indeed, they have huge incentives to be involved, as the ongoing struggles are generally not clashes between civilizations. Rather, what we are seeing is more accurately a clash within a civilization: that of the Islamic world.
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Iraq's Sunnis need to be brought back into the fold. They need to feel as though they have a stake in the success of Iraq rather than a stake in its failure.
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There were very few people who were both intercollegiate athletes and Star Men.
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The tragedy is that political leaders failed so badly at delivering what Iraqis clearly wanted - and for that, a great deal of responsibility lies with Prime Minister Maliki.