88 Quotes by Rick Atkinson

  • Author Rick Atkinson
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    In searching for a rationale to go to war, Bush settled on the notion of Saddam as an incarnation of evil, basically, and convinced himself that Saddam was fundamentally Adolf Hitler reborn. I think his feelings towards Saddam were in fact quite genuine and quite legitimately hostile. He was not play acting.

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  • Author Rick Atkinson
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    The people who write official histories for the Army believe that a generation needs to pass before you can tackle the official history. It's useful to have some distance. Sources become available. Passions cool. It allows an opportunity to make some real assessments and judgments about personalities and characters.

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  • Author Rick Atkinson
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    Global war is a clash of systems, not just battalions biffing one another in some godforsaken forest.

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  • Author Rick Atkinson
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    There are a number of World War II historians I admire: Cornelius Ryan, Mark Stoler, Antony Beevor, to name a few. As for generals, there are those I admire as combat leaders and others I admire because they're great fun to write about.

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  • Author Rick Atkinson
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    I was a foreign correspondent in Berlin in the mid-'90s.

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  • Author Rick Atkinson
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    If I've vividly laid out the narrative, the reader will come to his own conclusions.

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  • Author Rick Atkinson
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    I conduct very few interviews with veterans. The contemporaneous, or near-contemporaneous, record for WWII is so spectacularly deep that latter-day recollections are largely unnecessary for a historian. Of course, in considering any account, I'm looking for additional sources that can confirm or enlarge that version of events.

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  • Author Rick Atkinson
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    I think the Bush Administration had basically inherited a policy toward Iraq from the Reagan/Bush Administration that saw Iraq as a kind of fire wall against Iranian fundamentalism. And as it developed over the 1980s, it became a real political run-a-muck... even though the Iraqis were known to be harboring Palestinian terrorists.

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