...And while everybody was tremendously impressed with the low cost of the conflict, for the 146 Americans who were killed in action and for their families, it wasn't a cheap war. And the question in my mind is how many additional American casualties is Saddam worth? And the answer is not very damned many.

I can't think of a time when we've had a region emerge as suddenly to become as strategically significant as the Caspian.

My own belief is that the way we grow the economy, create jobs, create wealth is in the private sector. The government doesn't do that.

You cannot be driven by the polls. The polls change all the time; they're easily manipulated by whoever wants to ask those poll questions; they go up; they go down.

Westerners know the difference between a talker and the real deal. If Rick Perry wasn't right to be governor of Texas, why should he be president?

We have no intention of ignoring or appeasing history's latest gang of fanatics trying to murder their way to power.

The biggest threat we face is the possibility of terrorist groups like al Qaeda equipped with weapons of mass destruction, with nukes, bugs or gas. That was the threat after 9/11 and when we took down Saddam Hussein we eliminated Iraq as a potential source of that.