Rick Atkinson Quotations

That was a pretty fine Army that we had in 1965. By 1973, it was in tatters. It was a disgrace to the country and to itself, to its own heritage, really. So it's, you know, the Army belongs to all 307 million of us. It is our common possession, it's our common heritage. As goes the Army, so goes the republic.

I think the Bush Administration had basically inherited a policy toward Iraq from the Reagan/Bush Administration that saw Iraq as a kind of fire wall against Iranian fundamentalism. And as it developed over the 1980s, it became a real political run-a-muck... even though the Iraqis were known to be harboring Palestinian terrorists.

I conduct very few interviews with veterans. The contemporaneous, or near-contemporaneous, record for WWII is so spectacularly deep that latter-day recollections are largely unnecessary for a historian. Of course, in considering any account, I'm looking for additional sources that can confirm or enlarge that version of events.

If I've vividly laid out the narrative, the reader will come to his own conclusions.

I was a foreign correspondent in Berlin in the mid-'90s.

I think I may try and write something about my pretty extraordinary experience with the 101st in Iraq.

In searching for a rationale to go to war, Bush settled on the notion of Saddam as an incarnation of evil, basically, and convinced himself that Saddam was fundamentally Adolf Hitler reborn. I think his feelings towards Saddam were in fact quite genuine and quite legitimately hostile. He was not play acting.

I was born in Munich, and my father was stationed in Salzburg. For the first three years of my life, I lived in Austria back when the American Army was still in Austria. I grew up subsequently in posts around the country around veterans.

In battle, topography is fate.

If Ive vividly laid out the narrative, the reader will come to his own conclusions.