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Qatar has funded and helped arm ISIS. They also, as we all know, fund Hamas. That's got to stop. And we've got to use our pressure against that country to knock that stuff off.
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The thing I have in common with Donald Trump is, about a dozen years ago, we got a 'Man of the Year' award in New York City, the Hotel Plaza, from the USO.
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I read people; that's one of my strengths. It's not that I can't be fooled, but I'm not fooled often.
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One of the banners I would put up in front of any American president and new administration is 'Do not overreact to your predecessors' policies.'
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To get an Army that's already fighting a war to change in stride to a total different military strategy on the ground - and to get everybody on the same page - was accomplished by the sheer force of Dave Petraeus' will.
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The fact to the matter is, we never developed a comprehensive strategy to deal with radical Islam. And the 9/11 commission said one of the things we must do is develop a global alliance to combat it.
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The military executes policy decisions.
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ISIS is at war with America, but America is not at war with ISIS - not the president, nor the Congress, and certainly not the American people.
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By the end of 2008, clearly the Al Qaeda and Sunni insurgency had been relatively stabilized. And in the Al Qaeda's mind, they were defeated.
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If you took ISIS' oil, that would not stop them. It's not their only source of revenue. It would be a setback, but it would not stop them.
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I believe, for a long time, protracted wars test the will of any democracy, to be sure, and people will underwrite a protracted war if they see some progress. But if they don't see progress, and it appears to be futile and useless, then that political support begins to evaporate rather quickly.
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Since 1989, we have been deploying on an average of every 18 months.
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Cyberespionage and cyberattack is exploding from our adversaries inside our country. We don't seem capable of stopping it.
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Frankly, our adversaries are emboldened by the lack of American leadership in the world, and our friends and our allies, they have lost trust in us.
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Al Qaeda has overplayed their hand. What the al Qaeda do when they go into a town or village or a neighborhood inside a major city is they get a stranglehold on the people themselves. They force the men to wear beards and the women to be properly costumed and essentially completely covered up.
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The Arab Spring, nobody's in the streets demonstrating for radical Islam; they're in the streets with a window of democracy. They want our political reform, our social justice, and our economic opportunity.
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Fighting forces, particularly ground forces, have to operate on the basis of unit cohesion.
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Radical Islamists spread from Western Africa through the Middle East, all the way to South Asia to sub-Indian continent.
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What did we want out of Iraq? We wanted a country that was stable and secure, that elected its own government, that was not going to be a threat to its neighbors and also was capable of protecting and defending itself. That was our objective in Iraq.
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On a professional side, you've got a tough problem to fix, Geoff Miller's going to do it, and he's always going to do it to very high standards, and he's always going to be on the side of right. He's always talking about 'what right looks like' - just a phrase he would always use.
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'Duty' is a refreshingly honest memoir and a moving one. Mr. Gates scrupulously identifies his flaws and mistakes: He waited too long, for example, for the military bureaucracy to fix critical supply issues like the drones needed in Iraq and took three years to replace a dysfunctional command structure in Afghanistan.
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When you had thugs and bullies and killers imposing their will on their own people or other people - if you don't respond to it, it just keeps coming because they're encouraged by their own success.
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Most people who aspire to be president don't have a foreign policy and national security background. The exception was certainly Hillary Clinton.
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The only people that have ever fought ISIS in Syria is not the regime; it is the Free Syrian Army.