America owed its military renaissance in the 1980s and 1990s to Vietnam. Veterans like Norman Schwartzkopf, Colin Powell, Alfred Grey, Charles Krulak, and Wesley Clark returned home angry and ashamed at their defeat and rebuilt all-volunteer, professional armed forces from the ground up.

A good journalist is modest; his only job is simple: to decide what counts as news.

After spending the 1980s building up Saddam's Iraq as a counterweight to Iran, U.S. policy abruptly reversed course with his invasion of Kuwait and has since tried to cut him down to size. The policy is called 'containment,' but the question is, containment of what?

Since Franklin Roosevelt's leadership in setting up the United Nations and the Nuremberg trials, the U.S. has promoted universal legal norms and the institutions to enforce them while seeking, by hook or by crook, to exempt American citizens, especially soldiers, from their actual application.

America is a center right government, center right people. They want government but they don't want it to be excessive. They want it to be affordable. And most importantly what Americans want is to pass on to their next generation their children a country that's better, stronger and more vibrant and more prosperous.

No adviser to a president is going to get his way all of the time, but at a minimum, that adviser should be able to defend the tilt of an administration's policy as if it were his own. If not, he should make room for those who can.

I stand before you today because this vision of government as the engine of opportunity is what I believe in.

We can have democracy in this country, or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can't have both.