Commanders Of The United States Central Command

"Frankly, any man that doesn't cry scares me a little bit. I don't think I would like a man who was incapable of enough emotion to get tears in his eyes every now and then. That type of person scares me. That's not a human being."

"At Newark airport, I climbed into a taxi. Wearing my uniform with all my ribbons and my Vietnamese airborne beret, I kept waiting for the driving to make a big fuss and exclaim "Hey! You're just back from Vietnam, aren't you!" Nothing. So I fed him hints like, "Gee, I haven't seen Newark for a while." But he dropped me at my mother's place with scarcely a word... I was pretty disoriented. I couldn't think about anything but Vietnam. The war was all over the newspapers, but people seemed not to care. Even when Mom introduced me to a few of her friends, they only said things like, "Well, I guess now you'll be able to get on with your life." No one wanted to know about Vietnam: the public wasn't caught up in the war, not at all like the spirit I remembered from my boyhood, during World War II. After two days I wanted to run through the streets yelling, "Hey! In Vietnam people are dying! Americans are dying! How can you act like nothing is happening?""

"Political progress will only take place if sufficient security exists."

"In the absence of orders, figure out what they should have been and execute aggressively."

"There are no easy choices. The way ahead will be very hard. Progress will require determination and difficult U.S. and Iraqi actions, especially the latter, as ultimately the outcome will be determined by the Iraqis. But hard is not hopeless, and if confirmed, I pledge to do my utmost to lead our wonderful men and women in uniform and those of our coalition partners in Iraq as we endeavor to help the Iraqis make the most of the opportunity our soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines have given to them."

"Syria has allowed its soil to be transited by foreign fighters who have come from a variety of source countries in the Gulf area and in the — in North African countries. There are some signs that that may have been reduced somewhat in the last couple of months. We need to watch that a bit and see if that is the case."

"Iran, as we have already discussed, has carried out very, very harmful activities inside Iraq. Funding, trainings, arming and, in some cases, even directing the activities of the special groups associated with the Jaish al-Mahdi and the Sadr Militia."

"Another practitioner of the counterinsurgency war was General David Petraeus. I first met him at Fort Campbell in 2004. He had a reputation as one of the smartest and most dynamic young generals in the Army. He had graduated near the top of his class at West Point and earned a Ph.D. from Princeton. In 1991, he was accidentally shot in the chest during a training exercise. He endured a sixty-mile helicopter flight to Vanderbilt University Medical Center, where his life was saved by Dr. Bill Frist, later the Republican leader of the Senate. Early in the war, General Petraeus had commanded the 101st Airborne Division in Mosul. He sent his troops to live alongside the Iraqi residents and patrol the streets on foot. Their presence reassured residents that we were there to protect them. Petraeus then held local elections to form a provincial council, spent reconstruction funds to revive economic activity, and reopened the border with Syria to facilitate trade. His approach was textbook counterinsurgency. To defeat the enemy, he was trying to win over the people. It worked. While violence in much of Iraq increased, Mosul remained relatively calm. But When we reduced troops in Mosul, violence returned. The same would happen in Tal Afar."

"Even General Petraeus believes that leaking secret information is terrible-when others do it. In 2010 he said on Meet the Press about Chelsea Manning's revelations: "This is beyond unfortunate. I mean, this is a betrayal of trust... that is very reprehensible.""

"By the end of the Vietnam War, the American military had learned a good deal about how to fight a counterinsurgency war against a nationalist movement that used both conventional and guerrilla forces. The only problem was that few people wanted to remember either Vietnam or its lessons. There was, said T.X. Hammes, a Marine colonel who maintained an interest in counter-insurgency, “a pretty visceral reaction that we would not do this again.” American military training focused on conventional war; counter-insurgency was not even mentioned in the army’s core strategic planning in the 1970s. Hammes nevertheless studied the small wars in places such as Central America, Africa, and Afghanistan, and wrote a book on how to combat guerrilla warfare. A publisher turned it down: “Interesting book, well written, but a subject nobody’s interested in because it’s not going to happen.” The Sling and the Stone: On War in the 21st Century finally came out in 2004 as the Americans were painfully learning in Iraq the lessons they had chosen to forget. In 2005, General Petraeus, one of the few American generals to devise successful tactics in Iraq, set up a counter-insurgency academy there. Back in the United States, he made the study of counter-insurgency compulsory at the army’s advanced training colleges. Two books, T.E. Lawrence’s Seven Pillars of Wisdom, about the Arab revolt against the Turks during World War I, and Counterinsurgency Warfare by the French officer David Galula, became unexpected bestsellers in bookstores near army bases."

"Teamed up with General Dave Petraeus (Commander Central Command and responsible for the entire region), America now has two generals who understand how to fight on the battlefield, as well as in Washington for resources. Stan McChrystal made an assessment of the situation he inherited and immediately saw the mission/resource mismatch. His request for thirty-thousand additional troops, while not a political best-seller in Washington, came at a critical time to reverse the trend he found in Afghanistan- a growing insurgency, a reemerging Taliban, and a loss of confidence by the Afghan people, which undermines the confidence the international community has in Karazai. Today, it appears that Generals Petraeus and McChrystal (Commander U.S. Forces Afghanistan) are starting to turn things around. Only time will tell if the U.S. effort, as a part of NATO, will be able to leave behind a stable Afghanistan with a more sophisticated infrastructure and systems resembling today's more modern nations. For sure, it won't be easy or fast. But if we remember the conditions that led to 9/11 and take into consideration the possible outcome of an al-Qaeda-controlled Afghanistan that already has a toehold in Afghanistan's next-door, nuclear-armed neighbor, Pakistan, we just might conclude that the effort will be well worth it."

"Colin Powell said recently that he was disappointed that some of the intelligence on Iraq's WMD program was "inaccurate and wrong and in some cases deliberately misleading." That, of course, is the nature of human intelligence. The issue is not whether the source of the intelligence information was telling the truth, but whether George Tenet, Colin Powell, and President George W. Bush believed that the information was true. I believe they did. I know I did. And I do not regret my role in disarming Iraq and removing the Baathist regime."

"General Tommy Franks, the man in charge of the initial invasion, bluntly told reporters, “We don’t do body counts.” One survey found that most Americans thought Iraqi deaths were in the tens of thousands. But our calculations, using the best information available, show a catastrophic estimate of 2.4 million Iraqi deaths since the 2003 invasion."

"Later that evening, with exhaustion setting in and nothing left to do but wait for clearance to fly, Cathy and I took the aircrew to dinner; the members of our traveling staff stayed behind, chained to their phones and computers. We walked through the quiet waterfront to the lamp-lit, sandstone-block courtyard of the Mylos Taverna. As we filed to our corner table, the normally-effusive chatter of the Greek patrons dropped to a whisper. I scanned the nearby tables; faces everywhere were drawn with sadness. Yiannis, our usually-smiling waiter, approached silently and shook my hand as if at a funeral. "Everyone is so sorry, General," the man said."

"Sitting back in the hard plastic chair on the hotel roof, I reflected on that talk I'd given to the CENTCOM intelligence staff the previous Friday. America was in deep shock, reeling from the images of airliners smashing into buildings and those proud towers collapsing like flaming tinsel. Would my fellow citizens now be persuaded to abandon their hard-won individual freedoms to earn a bit more security in a clearly insecure world? As I stood up, another thought struck me. Today is like Pearl Harbor. The world was one way before today, and will never be that way again. We stand at a crease in history."

"Bill Cohen had a will-earned reputation as a thoughtful, decisive Secretary of Defense. When the staff lit up the plasma screens and ran the tapes of the Bright Star exercise, showing how the friendly coalition "Greenland" had defeated the aggressors of "Orangeland", Cohen asked all the right questions. He seemed especially impressed that we had assembled the system using commercially available hardware. Our staff officers and sergeants were on their toes. They answered all the secretary's questions, and he left with a smile on his face. I was proud of the command post- and of the young men and women who had made it such a success."

"When I was six, we moved to the small town of Stratford, about fifteen miles northeast of Wynnewood. My father had worked as a banker, a grain farmer, a fix-it man, and a mechanic. Now he was ready for a new line of work. When I was young, his restless streak seemed perfectly normal. A few years later, I realized that he was an optimistic dreamer, convinced that the next job or business would make us rich. And the fact is that my dad was good at everything he took on. Maybe too good. There wasn't a refrigerator, an outboard motor, a gas or diesel engine that he couldn't repair. If somebody drove over a backfiring John Deere Model 60 tractor to have Ray Franks "take a little look at the damn timing chain," my father would rebuild the engine. And if they'd shaken hands on a price of ten dollars for the job, he would not accept a nickel more, even if he'd spent fifteen dollars on spare parts."

"Another hallway led to a green steel door. "This is the execution chamber," the officer said. "The day of the execution, we take the man through this door." He opened the green door, and we blinked at the bright lights inside. A big chair filled the room. I could smell leather. "All right, boys," he said. "Line up." The kids made a straight line that led out the green door, then moved ahead, one at a time, to sit in the big wooden chair. "This is the electric chair, Tommy Ray," my dad explained. "It's where murderers are executed." The boys inched forward. Some sat longer in the chair than others. Executed meant killed, that much I knew. "This is the ultimate consequence for the ultimate act of evil," my father told the troop. When all the boys had sat in the chair, it was my turn. I reached up and felt the smooth wood, the leather straps with cold metal buckles. There was a black steel cap dangling up there like a lamp without a bulb. "Up you go, Tommy Ray," Dad said, hoisting me into the chair. The boys were staring at me. But I wasn't even a little bit afraid. My father stood right beside me. I could feel his warm hand next to the cool metal buckle. As the school bus rumbled out of the prison parking lot that afternoon, I stared back at the high walls. I had learned another important lesson. A consequence was what followed what you did. If you did good things, you'd be rewarded with further good things. If you broke the law, you'd have to pay the price. I have never forgotten that lesson."

"To all who serve... and those who love them."

"We don't do body counts."

"The family plots are close together in the sparse shade. My father, Ray. My mother, Lorene. Aunt Mildred and Uncle Bob, Docie, Betty, Johnny and Doris Jean. All of them there, all of them at rest. Seeing my father's grave, I smile, remembering something he told me when I was a teenager, conflicted over some long-forgotten crisis. "What do you think you should do about it, Tommy Ray?" He'd asked. "I dunno," I'd said. "It's all so confusing." He looked at me with a gentle smile. "Remember this, son. You don't necessarily need to know anything to have an opinion." Since that day, I've been what you might call opinionated, although as an adult, I like to believe I've earned the opinions I have."

"As the night passed, Rifle updated me on the readiness of our forces, the locations of our aircraft carrier battle groups, and the "Global power" timelines for missions by B-2 stealth bombers flying from Whiteman Air Force Base in Missouri. I had received an intelligence alert that as many as thirty additional terrorist strikes were possible worldwide. But there had been no more attacks... so far. Maybe this was because we'd buttoned up, sealing our vulnerabilities by going to Threat Con Delta. By now, CNN was running tape of President Bush flying back to Andrews and landing in Marine One on the White House lawn. The immediate crisis was over: the President was back in the Oval Office, the Secretary of Defense was in the wounded Pentagon. America was putting on her "game face". I was proud of my country."

"I think it's (Israeli pressure for invading Iraq) the worst kept secret in Washington, everybody I talked to in Washington has known and fully knows what their agenda was and what they were trying to do; because I mentioned the Neo-Conservatives who describe themselves as Neo-Conservatives, I was called, Anti-Semitic."

"The United Nations offers international legitimacy in what we might do."

"When I joined the United States Marine Corps as an eighteen-year-old in 1961, I would have told you that wars are always decided entirely on the battlefield. That's where the generals win or lose. I retired in 2000 after four decades of service and multiple experiences in wars and military interventions. By then I had come to realize that there is more to it than that. Political decisions, intelligence estimates, strategies (or their absence), and many other non-battlefield components influenced outcomes to a far greater degree than that eighteen-year-old new Marine could have ever imagined. These off the battlefield components have become increasingly significant as each new intervention is attempted in today's complex world."

"Yet, here we are, long and difficult years into that conflict,” ... “we still have not created the state we promised them. On the contrary, our costly and valiant efforts have produced an outcome our government did not predict or intend—a failed state spinning out of control into anarchy and civil war."

"We promised the Iraqi people freedom, democracy, security and a new and far better life."

"Nearly four years after our country invaded and occupied Iraq, Americans are facing the painful truth that our nation has failed to achieve the Bush administration’s ambitious goals for that tragic land."

"How the hell did we get here?" is the question we are left with when the smoke clears. And, inevitably, the answers we get from the men and women who lead us into these commitments are laced with excuses. "We can never know how things will turn out," they tell us with a bewildered shrug. "It's the nature of war to be unpredictable." Or they say, "The burden of all our responsibilities and the crisis response timing made clear planning and actions impossible." Or, "Every war is different." These are copouts."