John Abizaid

“I don't believe Iran is a suicide state.”

“But all that having been said, you can't, in a city of a million people like Karbala, or 5 million like Baghdad, you can't be in all places at all times.”

“You don't build a new power plant in the United States overnight. It takes years to build.”

“Everybody needs to understand that I learned Arabic from the United States Army as a second language. I never spoke it at home.”

“And so I think that if the person has the funds, the network, and the equipment to do this, and also the experience, which is the key factor, then they can be quite deadly.”

“I think what actually works best is local-level individual targeting of key leadership nodes.”

“The power to prevent violence is a power that no police force seems to have anywhere in the United States.”

“Capturing any member of any terrorist cell or any insurgent cell that we may happen to come across is always very, very valuable, and the thing that interests me is that in most instances after a time, people talk and they tell us what they know.”

“The United States is the most powerful nation on Earth and it just can't walk away from the Middle East and central Asia and the Horn of Africa.”

“In other words, for every 10 enemy you kill you bring on 20 new recruits to their anti-coalition cause then essentially you are working against yourself.”

“We need to make it very clear to the Iranians, the same way we made it clear to the Soviet Union and China, that their first use of nuclear weapons would result in the devastation of their nation.”

“Oh, the transition concerns me because as we move towards an important political event, it's clear to me that the terrorists and insurgents will move as hard as they can to disrupt this process.”

“It's also natural in that part of the world to blame what people view as the... as the most important authority in the region, and that currently is the United States of America.”

“I think you also understand that one of the key things that's got to be done in Iraq is to build a mentality of understanding that the military needs to be subordinate to civilian control and respectful of its own people.”

“Undoubtedly, there are members of the former regime that are cooperating in some fashion and then there are extremists that are within Iraq that are cooperating with them.”

“But clearly the fact that we've gone from zero Iraqi security forces on duty in May to up to 200,000 today is an enormous accomplishment, but it's not enough.”