The first time I met President Obama was 2006 in Baghdad. He was the senator from Illinois; it was a month before he actually ended up declaring. He had to come to Baghdad to kind of check that box, and… — Michael Hastings Copy Share Image
Obama's people will all often complain about how trivial and silly the media is, but there's no president who's probably benefited from this sort of trivialness or superficial nature as President Obama. — Michael Hastings Copy Share Image
I have a deep-seated skepticism about the morality of violence. Violence is almost always morally corrosive. — Michael Hastings Copy Share Image
The humanitarian argument is so selective I find it difficult to swallow. It's not even so much about the choice as to where we… — Michael Hastings Copy Share Image
If Bill O'Reilly is calling you a far-left critic, in my book, no matter what your political persuasion is, that's probably - that probably… — Michael Hastings Copy Share Image
I'm post-cynical on this stuff. I look at the El Salvador model as the glory days: Why don't we just fund the death squads secretly and keep our boys at home? That where I almost am at this point. Clearly the American military has been a force for good for the United States. There's a reason we have a standing… — Michael Hastings Copy Share
Whether or not Afghanistan would be a peaceful nation-state had we not gone into Iraq I doubt. Afghanistan is going to be Afghanistan, no… — Michael Hastings Copy Share Image
One of their major initiatives was getting all officers on Facebook. So the question is, why are these people who are there to train the Afghans being pressured to be on Facebook? Again, it sounds benign until you realize that the military's concern isn't the Afghans, it's convincing the American people that we should be in Afghanistan.Soldiers can put up… — Michael Hastings Copy Share
It was interesting watching the Afghanistan war review deliberations, this three-month process where Barack Obama did the most thorough foreign policy review ever by a modern American president. Compare that to Libya. For a month he said we weren't going to do anything, then suddenly changed his mind and did it on the fly. My view is that it's not… — Michael Hastings Copy Share
Inside the White House there were always extreme amounts of doubt about whether they should be escalating in Afghanistan. In fact, most of the president's advisers said, "This is probably not going to work." A lot of people in the military said, "This is probably not going to work." If the thumbnail version of the Iraq war was that George… — Michael Hastings Copy Share
The State Department is essentially... I was going to use the word useless. But I don't know if that's correct. — Michael Hastings Copy Share Image
If someone tells you something is off the record, I don't print it. If they don't tell me something is off the record, then… — Michael Hastings Copy Share Image
If you polled the military in Afghanistan as to how many think we should be there or not, the numbers would probably be similar… — Michael Hastings Copy Share Image
Afghanistan would have been difficult enough without Iraq. Iraq made it impossible. The argument that had we just focused on Afghanistan we'd now be okay is persuasive, but it omits the fact that we weren't supposed to get involved in nation-building in Afghanistan.In my new book, I open with a quote from Donald Rumsfeld. In October 2001, he said of… — Michael Hastings Copy Share
