Michael Dukakis Quotes
Like a good general, I treated everyone who wasn't with me as against me.
At the time, some House Republicans had taken an untenable and unpopular position and forced the government to shut down by not passing laws authorizing the expenditures. He had been asked his advice for President Obama who seemed to be winning this particular political squabble.
In Pakistan, the civilian governments were not in control of the army who would have their own polices, foreign and domestic. When the head of the Army assumed the Presidency in a coup, he approached the Prime Minister of India—the Pakistan traditional enemy—and assured him that unlike with the civilian governments, he could negotiate for the country. Ironically, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh disclosed this quotation after Pervez Musharraf was deposed and democracy and civilian government returned to Pakistan. However the Indian Prime Minister then complained that there was no one to negotiate with as the civilian elected prime minister could not speak for the army—still the major power in Pakistan.
The General refused. He had already achieved a strategic victory and it was only a matter of time when the Dutch would withdraw on their own as their supply lines were cut off and the populations wanted them out.
Blair was then the leader of the opposition Labor party. Major, the prime minister, did not have firm control of his own party and was whipsawed between different factions. He was ousted by his own party, not by losing an election.
So far as the Iraq government was concerned the important enemy were the minority Sunni Muslims who had dominated the Shiites before the American Invasion. For America the enemy was Al Qaeda and the terrorists as well as the Sunnis. We ended up fighting Sunnis and even Shiites as the definition of the enemy changed with time.
Michael Stanley Dukakis is a retired American politician and lawyer who served as the 65th governor of Massachusetts, from 1975 to 1979 and again from 1983 to 1991. He is the longest-serving governor in Massachusetts history and only the second Greek-American governor in U.S. history, after Spiro Agnew. He was nominated by the Democratic Party for president in the 1988 election, losing to the Republican nominee, Vice President George H. W. Bush.
