Southwest Quotes - page 3
Ironically, during four years of war, MacArthur may have owed the most to the very people he was certain were out to discredit and disparage him. While never among his fans, Franklin Roosevelt and George Marshall nonetheless consistently supported MacArthur within the framework of their global priorities, from the first efforts to resupply the Philippines to MacArthur's appointment as Allied supreme commander. Even then, where would MacArthur's Southwest Pacific Area have been had not Ernie King urged the Joint Chiefs to pour resources into the Pacific and wage a two-front war?
Douglas MacArthur
With his flamboyant headgear, his sunglasses and corn cob pipe, he looked like an actor playing the role of a great general. He also had the sort of press an actor likes; he arranged that, in part, by keeping his subordinates as anonymous as possible. But the truth was that Douglas MacArthur, Supreme Commander of Allied Forces in the Southwest Pacific, was a great general. He had one of the most distinguished military careers on record (top of his class at West Point, a hero in the first war, Army Chief of Staff), and it is doubtful that anyone in any of the services knew more about the Pacific theater. Nonetheless, the war that would be waged to return him to the Philippines, as he had promised, would be a Navy war, and [three admirals] - Nimitz, King, and Halsey - would have every bit as much to do with the strategy and tactics of winning that war as he had.
Douglas MacArthur
Feist: "I met Maya Arulpragasam about four or five years ago in England when I was on tour with the rapper Peaches, who was also my roommate. We stayed with Justine Frischmann, from Elastica, and she and Maya were roommates. Maya wasn't making music back then; she was making clothes and videos and art, spray-painting jackets. A couple months ago, I was at the South by Southwest Festival in Austin, and I saw her onstage, and it was just amazing. I can't stop listening to her new album, Arular (XL/Beggars U.S.). "Pull Up the People" is a song that's always rotating through my head. I didn't know I needed sunshine-dancehall-booty music until I got her record."
M.I.A.
I felt that withdrawing from Syria was a huge mistake, because of both the continuing global threat of ISIS and the fact that Iran's substantial influence would undoubtedly grow. I had argued to Pompeo and Mattis as far back as June that we should end our piecemeal policy in Syria, looking at one province or area at a time (e.g., Manbij, Idlib, the southwest exclusion zone, etc.) and focus on the big picture. With most of the ISIS territorial caliphate gone (although the ISIS threat itself was far from eliminated) the big picture was stopping Iran. Now, however, if the US abandoned the Kurds, they would either have to ally with Assad against Turkey, which the Kurds rightly considered the greater threat (thereby enhancing Assad, Iran's proxy), or fight on alone, facing almost certain defeat, caught in the vise between Assad and Erdogan.
John R. Bolton
The collective memory of every Latino people includes direct or indirect (neo-)colonialism, primarily by Spain or Portugal and later by the United States. Among Latinos, Mexicans in what we now call the Southwest have experienced US colonialism the longest and most directly, with Puerto Ricans not far behind.
Elizabeth Martinez
The Southwest also faces increasing friction with adjoining Mexico. This is not a racist provocation but a description of reality. No other first-world country has such an extensive land frontier with a third-world country. The income gap between the United States and Mexico is greater than that between any other two contiguous countries in the world.
James Howard Kunstler