I anticipate that at least lead elements of it will be here,

In their second term, administrations tend to be more multilateral, more pragmatic. It’s the pattern of every one, going back to Eisenhower.

That we have had to spend several years relearning these lessons is a measure of the U.S. defense establishment’s failure to take counterinsurgency seriously after the American retreat from Vietnam.

Most Iraqis remain less secure than they were under Saddam, less secure even than they were in the first year of the American occupation.

We think we’ve made a lot of progress over the last year.

There was a real sense of solidarity among the neighboring states, a desire to see this work and send a signal to all the Afghan factions that they were no longer to receive assistance if...

It was well known by everyone, including the US government, that the system as constructed invited kickbacks,

We’re going to have to face the fact that there are strong centrifugal forces in Iraq that have the potential of tearing the country apart.

There has been a need for the bank to be in Iraq.

The main requirement is negotiation within parties — which won’t be too hard — about who should occupy the most senior positions. But then among parties, about how those positions should be distributed,

It demonstrates that we’re determined to play a continuing diplomatic, political and economic role here in assisting Afghanistan to make the transition from war to peace,

The most important force in Iraq for breaking up the country and preventing a strong central government isn’t the insurgency, it’s the Kurds, and the second most important force is the Shiites.

The U.S. has never been able to protect the population, and has thus never won its confidence and secured its support.

Voters are not looking for creative, forward-looking candidates, they are looking for people who they think can protect them. They fall back on the familiar and the powerful. The same thing happened in postwar Bosnia,...

The Bonn Agreement, which was negotiated four years ago, has been a remarkably successful road map toward Afghanistan’s political evolution, in which all of its benchmarks have been met more or less on schedule.

We are here, and we are here to stay, … I declare this mission open for business.

The United States has oscillated between extremes of attention and neglect in Haiti. The basic problem is that our focus has never been continuous.