People want their leaders to talk about the future. They don't want anger and pessimism and personal attacks. They want a positive vision from leaders looking forward,

There is a deep sense of pessimism and anger that may burst into the open and become violent without being backed by any political force.

There are no warlike people, just warlike leaders.

There are no warlike people - just warlike leaders.

Pessimism is a very easy way out when you’re considering what life really is, because pessimism is a short view of life. If you look at what is happening around us today and what has happened just since you were born, you can’t help but feel that life is a terrible complexity of problems and illnesses of one sort or another. But if you look back a few thousand years, you realize that we have advanced fantastically from the day when the first amoeba crawled out of the slime and made its adventure on land. If you take a long view, I do not see how you can be pessimistic about the future of man or the future of the world.

There's a real danger today, if political leaders in Baghdad do not step up to the responsibilities, that they will become increasingly irrelevant to the people of Iraq. And that country will tip into sectarian warfare, which will essentially, I think, leave us with very few options in terms of continued presence of our military forces.