Ike Skelton Quotes
That was a declaration of war
At the time the President denied that he had decided to invade Iraq. Skelton saw the “handwriting on the world.”
Ike Skelton, U.S. Congressman (Democrat, MO), Characterizing President Bush’s State of the Union Address, 2002, Quoted in Thomas E. Ricks, Fiasco- The American Military Adventure in Iraq
Sourced by: Eigen's Political and Historical Quotations
The line was delivered by Dustin Hoffman.
The English were at War with Napoleon and Denmark was neutral. British leaders feared that Denmark might either ally themselves with Napoleon or provide him with ships from their well equipped fleet. The English decided on a preemptive attack on Denmark and Paget and other Captains were ordered to Denmark. When they arrived they were ordered to bombard Copenhagen and force the Danes to surrender. When this happened, the British seized the Danish ships and simply took them as war prizes. The issues of the morality and wisdom of preemptive attacks, as with the Americans in the Iraq war, was thoroughly debated but the government view prevailed to the shame of most Englishmen.
Confederate General Wheeler had introduced a new tactic of mining the roads with improvised explosive devices which took their toll on Sherman’s troops. At the time, this was against the ruled of war. Sherman ordered a few Confederate prisoners to the front and required them to walk ahead of his troops and demine the roads. He then allowed some of the prisoners to return to General Wheeler with a note from Sherman, explaining that if the Confederates persisted in this unethical form of warfare he would march all of the Confederate prisoners in the front of the troops and force them do remove the explosives by hand regardless of the danger. Wheeler never planted land mines again.
He was criticizing the George W. Bush administration for attacking Iraq, a country which had not attacked the United States or Americans abroad while America did not attack those terrorists and countries which had killed Americans. For example, Hezbollah which blew up the Marine Barracks in Lebanon and the naval ship Cole.
The meaning is that to be victorious in war one should not be inhibited from doing cruel and brutal things that war sometimes necessitates.
Isaac Newton Skelton IV was an American politician who was the U.S. Representative for Missouri's 4th congressional district from 1977 to 2011. During his tenure, he served as the chairman of the House Armed Services Committee. He was a member of the Democratic Party. On November 2, 2010, he unexpectedly lost his seat to Republican Vicky Hartzler amid a Republican landslide. Notably, he was one of three Democratic committee chairmen to lose reelection in the 2010 midterm cycle, alongside House Budget Committee chairman John Spratt of South Carolina and House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee chairman Jim Oberstar of Minnesota.
