I hope your optimism plays out. But, you know, we wanted--we Americans love elections, and we had an election over there, and it didn't come out exactly the way we wanted it.

They have got to be right on that.

I'm really concerned about Afghanistan.

I'd like to see an end game, but I don't know who's smart enough to develop an end game for us in that country.

You just don't have the country itself having the willpower, the political willpower, to join us in that.

To me, trying to say, 'Well, we don't want any corruption in the country' is kind of like telling the Mafia...

I've got to tell you, I was--I have been stunned by the lack of progress in Afghanistan.

the best way to do that would not be the immediate use of force against Iran, but this two-track policy that we've been discussing in this hearing of engagement and negotiations, but backed up by the threat of force and backed up by…

It seems to me that the Iranians lump the United States and Israel together as far as those two countries' edginess toward the ultimate resolution of the issue.

I think it is one of our central interests here to help Israel.

I think that if these talks are successful and they can put a few people on each of those ships, and they took aggressive action in the case of an attack, I would suspect that's going to slow them down.

I appreciate your comments, but don't we have to give just a little bit of slack to those guys in the fact that they had a real gun to their head at the time they were trying to structure this mammoth $700 billion we were talking about?