“We say in a democracy that good ideas will drive out bad ones, so if the good ones aren’t there, we’re left with the bad ones”

So I don’t think we’ve got any options and we’d be ill-advised to start bombing where we really can’t sort out the combatants or understand where the civilian population is.

Experience is valuable only if it’s imbued with meaning from which one can draw salient conclusions. Otherwise, experience becomes imprisoning.

We’ve got a national campaign by drug legalizers, in my view, to try and use medicinal uses of drugs and legalization of hemp as a stalking horse to get in under the radar screen.

The United States and Mexico are trapped – economically, culturally, politically and because of drug crime – in the same continent.

So at the end of the day, our number 1 goal, our top priority, is to motivate American youngsters to reject the abuse of illegal drugs, tobacco and alcohol. All three of them are illegal behaviors.

If you want to fight a war on drugs, sit down at your own kitchen table and talk to your own children.

At the end of the day…if your army won’t fight, it’s because they don’t trust their incompetent, corrupt generals, they don’t trust each other. This is an enduring civil war between the Shia, the Sunni, and the Kurds.

Colombia is in a risky position. They’ve got a peace process that’s going nowhere, and a drug production problem that’s skyrocketing.

The solution to our drug problem is not in incarceration.

I’m a professor of national security studies, and I know a lot more about fighting than Rumsfeld does.

Extremely disappointed that corruption may have reached such a level in Mexico.

Thank God we’re going to try to continue and effectively defend our frontiers with the Border Patrol, with the Customs Department, with the Coast Guard, with the Armed Forces.

When I get a very generous introduction like that I explain that I’m emotionally moved, but on the other hand I’m Irish and the Irish are very emotionally moved. My mother is Irish and she cries during beer commercials.

Now the United States has to ensure that Afghanistan does not immediately collapse after being left to itself in 2014.

If left to their own devices a child will achieve.

Keep trying until you have no more chances left.

You get into the cadence in your mind, and it’s hard to make the kind of left turn that you probably need to keep it really interesting.

I am not a Marxist, but I place myself resolutely at the left.

I am a Muslim Arab, in my actions oriented very to the left, in my convictions.

Maybe that’s why I was left out of a lot of things, or why my work was not really understood, because there was no precedent for it.

And I probably would’ve been better off if I’d left myself alone.