24 Quotes by Andrew Bacevich

Ideology makes people stupid.

Memorial Day orators will say that a G.I.'s life is priceless. Don't believe it. I know what value the U.S. government assigns to a soldier's life: I've been handed the check. It's roughly what the Yankees will pay Roger Clemens per inning once he starts pitching next month.

For the majority of contemporary Americans, the essence of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness centers on a relentless personal quest to acquire, consume, to indulge, and to shed whatever constraints might interfere with those endeavors.

Sometimes, when you can't fix the problem on your own, you need to make some compromises and find the partners who can get the job done for you.

The folly and hubris of the policy makers who heedlessly thrust the nation into an ill-defined and open-ended 'global war on terror' without the foggiest notion of what victory would look like, how it would be won, and what it might cost approached standards hitherto achieved only by slightly mad German warlords.

We are squandering our wealth in many respects, to the extent that we persist in our imperial delusions, we're also going to squander our freedom.

You know, we live in a country where if you want to go bomb somebody, there's remarkably little discussion about how much it might cost, even though the costs almost inevitably end up being orders of magnitude larger than anybody projected at the outcome. But when you have a discussion about whether or not we can assist people who are suffering, then suddenly we come very, you know, cost-conscious.

The US has a pretty good record of falling into this trap. The Bush administration has so overused the Hitler analogy that it's almost demeaning to history.

How do we know it is really an Iraqi Army rather than a sectarian Army? If it is not an Iraqi army, that really is going to put a damper on the notion of our drawing down forces.