But my Arabic is pretty good. It's good enough to have conversations with people, to understand what they say, to understand what they're feeling.

The United States is the most powerful nation on Earth and it just can't walk away from the Middle East and central Asia and the Horn of Africa.

The power to prevent violence is a power that no police force seems to have anywhere in the United States.

I think you also understand that one of the key things that's got to be done in Iraq is to build a mentality of understanding that the military needs to be subordinate to civilian control and respectful of its own people.

But the key shift in focus will be from counter-insurgency operations to more and more cooperation with Iraqi security forces and to building Iraqi security capacity.

Capturing any member of any terrorist cell or any insurgent cell that we may happen to come across is always very, very valuable, and the thing that interests me is that in most instances after a time people talk and they tell us what they know.

Well, the hardest thing to do, as we know from our own experience on 9/11 is protect everything all the time.