The most intense conflicts, if overcome, leave behind a sense of security and calm that is not easily disturbed. It is just these intense conflicts and their conflagration which are needed to produce valuable and lasting results.
I think every day we look at the mess of the chaos of the civil war in Iraq, I think every day people become more and more convinced that the war was a mistake. I think we have to learn from the mistakes of our past.
After every major conflict - World War I, World War II, Korea, Vietnam, the fall of the Soviet Union - what happened was that we ultimately hollowed out the force, largely by doing deep across-the-board cuts.
During my three years in Vietnam, I certainly heard plenty of last words by dying American footsoldiers. Not one of them, however, had illusions that he had somehow accomplished something worthwhile in the process of making the Supreme Sacrifice.
Going back to South Sudan after the independence took place was deeply emotional for me because I had gone through the civil war with my family just before going to seek refuge in London.
The wars don't end when you sign peace treaties or when the years go by. They will echo on until I'm gone and all the widows and orphans are gone.
After all the sacrifice in Afghanistan and Iraq, why do we find ourselves in a more dangerous world?
I would say of all the things that have happened during the course of my presidency the knowledge that you have hundreds of thousands of people who have been killed, millions who have been displaced, [makes me] ask myself what might I have done differently along the course of the last five, six years.
Officials of governments that use or produce landmines should be forced to see the reality of how landmines hurt people and make them suffer, because this would surely make them stop.
I literally went straight to New York City from Iraq, which was bizarre and complicated. I was walking down Madison Avenue, and it was spring, and people were smartly dressed, and it was so strange because there was no sense that we were at war. It was something to grapple with.
A war is only as good as the peace that follows.
Since the Pentagon underestimated the number of troops required after the end of hostilities, we were not prepared to prevent looting or to guard hundreds of weapons dumps spread throughout the country.
War brings out thieves and peace hangs them.
The rebuilding of Iraq has been terrible.
In remembering the appalling suffering of war on both sides, we recognise how precious is the peace we have built in Europe since 1945.
The Iraqis had paid a terrible price for Saddam's folly (in the Gulf War). But looking at the devastation they left behind (in Kuwait), my sympathy was limited.
Trying to rebuild Afghanistan on the cheap has left the country in the hands of warlords and an impotent Northern Alliance puppet regime that runs Kabul and nothing else.
On the morrow of each conflict I gave the categorical order to confiscate the largest possible number of weapons of every sort and kind.
One of the difficulties about interviewing people in Rwanda is that the country is trying to get on with ordinary life and some people just don't want to get involved in this.
Millions of people in nearly 80 countries still live in fear of landmines and explosive remnants of war, which take an unacceptable toll on lives and limbs, and people's livelihoods
Anyway, there were more after the war than before.
Landmines are among the most barbaric weapons of war, because they continue to kill and maim innocent people long after the war itself has ended. Also, fear of them keeps people off the land, and thus prevents them from growing food.
Not only do these abominable weapons lie buried in silence and in their millions waiting to kill or maim innocent women and children; but the presence or even the fear of the presence of a single landmine can prevent the cultivation of an entire field, rob a whole village of its livelihood, place yet another obstacle on a country's road to reconstruction and development
I think in a sense this is a house that was built on a bad foundation. And the foundation was the Americans coming here and allowing the sacking, burning and plunder of Baghdad, for whatever reason.
Killing Japanese didn't bother me very much at that time... I suppose if I had lost the war, I would have been tried as a war criminal.
