The presidents I served under don't have anything to do with my politics.

To say that you now trust the Russian military command and control system because some Russian general told you from the bottom of his heart that's the case, strikes me as most unrealistic.

The presidents I served under don't have anything to do with my politics.

I've decided that the political context is such that the only way reform will finally come about in the Russian military is that the deterioration goes beyond the point to which these old generals can stand up there and resist it.

The whole notion of land property rights in the Arab world is different from that in Europe.

So the idea that you could put Kurds, Shiite Arabs, and Sunni Arabs in a nice, liberal, federal system in Iraq in a short amount of time, six months or a year, boggles the mind.

In reality, I don't think that many of the policies we've attempted to apply to deal with it are going to have any serious effect.