Eliot Engel Quotes

For three years now, our brave men and women in uniform have done everything their country has asked of them, yet President Bush still does not have a plan to win the peace in Iraq and bring our troops home.

We will be drawing down some troops. If the president wants to try to turn that into the beginning of a success, he actually, I think, has some opportunity.

Never in the history of the United States have we cut back on troops when we've been at war.

You can’t fly in to an aircraft carrier and declare the war is over and then have American troops continue to die in Iraq. You just can’t do that.

We must have a timetable for withdrawal of U.S. forces - or at the very least a plan for it - something the administration has incredulously failed to do for over two years.

Any future Defense Secretary who advises the President to again send a big American land army into Asia or into the Middle East or Africa should have his head examined.

Reducing military presence has never in history won a war.

Although I voted against the initial resolution approving the war in Iraq, I have consistently voted to support our troops with much-needed armor and supplies.

Don't kid yourself. President Obama's decision to withdraw 33,000 troops from Afghanistan before he stands for reelection is not driven by the United States' 'position of strength' in the war zone as much as it is by grim economic and political realities at home.

The biggest problem was the politicians knew nothing about fighting a war.

America must continue diplomacy, even as we continue the war, to expand the coalition of the willing to share the burden of war and to share the responsibility and the economic cost of rebuilding Iraq.

We are running out of time. We need a strategy to win in Iraq or an exit strategy to leave.

I believe sincerely that we should bring in U.N. peacekeepers and bring our troops home.

War is not an independent phenomenon, but the continuation of politics by different means.

We want to support our troops because they didn't make the decision to go there... but I don't think it should be open-ended. We ought to have a benchmark where the administration has to come back and give us a report.

As the First World War made painfully clear, when politicians and generals lead nations into war, they almost invariably assume swift victory, and have a remarkably enduring tendency not to foresee problems that, in hindsight, seem obvious.

At a time when the insurgents are saying that time is working against them, my Democratic colleagues are introducing a measure to set a timetable for withdrawal in Iraq that will undercut the momentum that the insurgents themselves say we have built in Iraq.

I don't think the war in Afghanistan was ruthlessly enough waged.

Once you start a war, you have to win.

I thought Iraq was the wrong war at the wrong time and have been fighting to get the Administration to stop its failed policy and bring our troops home.

We can rebuild an alliance to fight ISIS, but we have to lead, and we have to give our allies what they are asking us to do. We do not have to march off to war, but we have to help our allies fight a war which we need them to win.

To go to war, you must always think of, can you win?

We should declare war on North Vietnam. We could pave the whole country and put parking strips on it, and still be home by Christmas.

People who start wars never know exactly how they will turn out.

A war initiated by faulty intelligence should not to complicated by a premature pull out of our troops.