“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.”

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.

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

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.

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.

I am very familiar with Hungary, because I grew up in Romania, which borders it.

On the border area with Lebanon where [Hezbollah forces] want to protect themselves and cooperate with us, but they don’t exist all over Syria.

One feels a quickening of the pulse when one crosses a border.

Hezbollah fighters are on the borders with Lebanon where the terrorists attacked them. On the borders with Lebanon, this is where Hezbollah retaliated, and this is where we have cooperation, and that’s good.

[Hezbollah forces] cannot exist all over Syria anyway, for many reasons, but they exist on the borders.

Since problems spill across borders, security anywhere depends on sustainable development everywhere.

Poetry feels like a country I visit without a passport, where I look around furtively, grab hold of something precious, and try to smuggle it back across the border. Any poem I get written down feels like contraband to me.

In my state [ Maryland] we’ve lost jobs to NAFTA, we did not gain jobs from NAFTA. But I think it’s very difficult when your state is right up against the northern border, you do see things differently.