While people out there on the spot certainly have to be held accountable for what they've done personally, the chain of command responsibility for this strikes me as just as important and should be dealt with.

Second, recent polls over there show that the majority of Iraqis want us to leave precipitously.

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.

I will make a general statement that we have not had anything like the policy of holding people in high office responsible for their acts that I think we should.

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.

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

Firing off 1,000 or 500 or 2,000 nuclear warheads on a few minutes' consideration has always struck me as an absurd way to go to war.