James Dobbins Quotations

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

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

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

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, where the parties that fed the conflict in the first place got most of the vote.

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

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

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

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

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 they did not adopt this accord.

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

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,