There was the situation in Nicaragua where the Sandinistas had taken over a couple of years earlier. There was a civil war going on in El Salvador and there was a similar situation in Guatemala. So Honduras was in a rather precarious geographic position indeed.

We believe that the vote would have been close. We regret that in the face of an explicit threat to veto by a permanent member, the vote-counting became a secondary consideration.

There was the situation in Nicaragua where the Sandinistas had taken over a couple of years earlier. There was a civil war going on in El Salvador and there was a similar situation in Guatemala. So Honduras was in a rather precarious geographic position indeed.

I think people took Grenada for what it turned out to be, which was a very specific incident and from which one couldn't necessarily make a lot of generalizations.

We negotiated with the Honduran government the establishment of a regional military training center, for training central American forces, but the primary motivation for doing that was to be able to bolster the quality, improve the quality of the El Salvadoran fighting forces.

To the contrary, I think we bent over backwards to press for elections and for democratic reform.

It seems to be that when these communist regimes take over - if you look at the example of Vietnam or Cambodia or Nicaragua - that even in conditions of peace they don't seem to be able to figure out how to support their people, and the human suffering is enormous.

Those of us who actually were working in the region at the time will point out how strongly committed we were to supporting the democratic process and encouraging elections, in spite of the fact that a war was going on in several of these countries.

I think there, there also had been just before I got to Honduras a rather spectacular capture of an arms shipment that from Nicaragua across Honduran test, territory destined for El Salvador and I think that some of that equipment had been also to Cuba and the Soviet bloc.

Right, well I am, I was a career diplomat for 37 years from 1960 until 1997 during the early 1980s from 1981 to 1985 I was the United States Ambassador to Honduras.

Well my briefing was that Honduras was a small and vulnerable country just back on the path towards democracy it was about to have just before I arrived, the first elections for a civilian president in more than 9 years.

The populations of Central America are very, very small indeed, so that while no one was denying and this was one of the great debates we used to have, whose fault was it that there were communists were able to do so well down there, well, that wasn't the point.

Very hard, very hard to represent a country, or carry out a policy that does not have consensus support.

By Rice's own standards, the war was well underway by the time he took office. He was a war president the moment he took the oath. But did he act like one?

Before and during the first phase of the war his administration repeatedly maligned the UN but now, that Iraq has turned into a quagmire, it is asking the UN for help.

What the war did was give me the opportunity of three years of continuous reading, and it was in the course of reading that I became convinced that I should become an economist.

Most fathers don't see the war within the daughter, her struggles with conflicting images of the idealized and flawed father, her temptation both to retreat to Daddy's lap and protection and to push out of his embrace to that of beau and the world beyond home.

In war there is no prize for runner-up.

But in the first Gulf war the United Kingdom was not under any threat from Iraq, and is still less so in the second one. Then there is no justification for obstructing freedom of information, particularly as nations have a right to know what their soldiers are being used for.

No one will deny that the excessive use of alcohol and alcoholic beverages would do more than any other single factor to make impossible a total war effort.

Since I'm allergic to various things, the army wouldn't accept me during the war, and I got into the Office of War Information, which sent music to Europe.

We were succeeding. When you looked at specifics, this became a war of attrition. We were winning.

Fantasy is toxic: the private cruelty and the world war both have their start in the heated brain.

Hair is also a problem. I remember once, when I was reporting from Beirut at the height of the civil war, someone wrote in to the BBC complaining about my appearance.

War, in some instances, especially defensive, has been authorized by Heaven.

There are not fifty ways of fighting, there's only one, and that's to win. Neither revolution nor war consists in doing what one pleases.

Especially today as we fight the war on terror - against an enemy that represents hatred, extremism and stands behind no flag - we need to remember the sacrifices that have gone into protecting our flag.

The seasons come up undisturbed by crime and war.

I was told my son was killed in the war on terror. He was killed by George Bush's war of terror on the world.

Fascism is a worldwide disease. Its greatest threat to the United States will come after the war, either via Latin America or within the United States itself.

The real peril of war lies not in military defeat. It lies in war itself, whether we win or lose.

We in this Congress have a choice. The American people have a right to exercise a choice on this issue, as to whether our men and women will continue to fight and die in a war based on deception and fantasy, or to start bringing the troops home.

War is just one more big government program.

In a war, you must hate somebody or love somebody; you must have a position or you cannot stand what goes on.

For a war correspondent to miss an invasion is like refusing a date with Lana Turner.

It is obvious that taking the country from a state of war to being a lawful state won't be easy.

But let's be clear. We're talking about a country where there's no opposition. As leader he can ignore Parliament and - sorry that's Tony Blair isn't it? Um, so he doesn't even have to ask the country before he goes to war - sorry that's still Tony Blair.

Every war results from the struggle for markets and spheres of influence, and every war is sold to the public by professional liars and totally sincere religious maniacs, as a Holy Crusade to save God and Goodness from Satan and Evil.

For governments at war, the media is an instrument of war or an element in war that is to be controlled.

I think unleashing 3,000 smart bombs against the city of Baghdad in the first several days of the war... to me, if those were unleashed against the San Francisco Bay Area, I would call that an act of extreme terrorism.

The high point of civilization is that you can hate me and I can hate you but we develop an etiquette that allows us to deal with each other because if we acted solely upon our impulse we'd probably go to war.

In the First World War, there was the sudden passion of nationalism, and the killing took place because of these emotions. But the Soviet case is different, because you had systematic murder, like the Holocaust.

We have the melancholy dilemma of not being in a state to make peace or to prosecute war.

It is only those who have neither fired a shot nor heard the shrieks and groans of the wounded who cry aloud for blood, more vengeance, more desolation. War is hell.

Peace, if it ever exists, will not be based on the fear of war but on the love of peace.

The Pakistani government under Musharraf is a strong and key player in the global war on terrorism, and their contribution has been second to none.

It's true that the war in Iraq opened a distance in relations between part of Europe and the U.S. government, but our basic ties are stronger than that. We share democracy, free markets and a commitment to Western security. We differ on how to guarantee that security.

There is no direct evidence that nuclear weapons prevented a world war. Conversely, it is known that they nearly caused one.

War should be the only study of a prince. He should consider peace only as a breathing-time, which gives him leisure to contrive, and furnishes as ability to execute, military plans.