There are people in Baghdad pursuing the initiative that I started, and I want to give them every chance of success. I don't want to provide any distractions.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
The Iraqis need help establishing a government. We have to provide them with security.
I urge the Iraqi leadership for sake of its own people... to seize this opportunity and thereby begin to end the isolation and suffering of the Iraqi people.
My goal in Baghdad was to facilitate a debate here in the United States on America's policy toward Iraq, a debate that's been sadly lacking.
We need to get serious about defeating ISIS; we just aren't serious about it yet. I would be very serious about getting it done. I know how to do it. We need to take the fight to them on the battlefield in a more serious way.
As leader of the effort of the Iraqi Survey Group, I spent most of my days not out in the field leading inspections. It's typically what you do at that level. I was trying to motivate, direct, find strategies.
Under our rules of engagement, if I were ISIS, what I would do is collocate my headquarters next to a school or a hospital and ensure that there would be collateral damage. They know our rules of engagement as well as we do. They operate with impunity.
Do not try to do too much with your own hands. Better the Arabs do it tolerably than you do it perfectly. It is their war, and you are to help them, not to win it for them.
Out of my desire to complete Iraq's independence and to finish the withdrawal of the occupation forces from our holy lands, I am obliged to halt military operations of the honest Iraqi resistance until the withdrawal of the occupation forces is complete.
As I have been saying for more than a year now, turning this vital mission over to the Iraqi people as soon as possible should remain a topic of debate for Congress while relying on our military commanders to set up the timetable.
Anything I can do to help destroy ISIS, I will support that.
No opposing quotes found.