That was my first lesson from Ben-Gurion. Then I saw him making peace, and I saw him making war. He mobilized me before the war. The man was a very rare combination between a real intellectual and a born leader. There is a contradiction between the two.

The reality is the cap-and-trade legislation offered by the Democrats amounts to an economic declaration of war on the Midwest by liberals on Capitol Hill.

The Patriot Act is essential to our continued success in the war on terror here at home.

If you take a book of a thousand pages on the Second World War, in which 50 million people died, the concentration camps occupy two pages and the gas chambers ten or 15 lines, and that's what one calls a detail.

When you write a two thousand page history of the Second World War, the deportations and the concentration camps will take up five pages, and the gas chambers perhaps 20 lines.

The result is that you are now experiencing what we experienced in the war in Algeria: The Israeli government says that it is a victim of terrorist activity, but this activity is less visible than the military strikes.

The Second World War claimed tens of millions of victims.

I have absolutely no regret about my vote against this war. The same questions remain. The cost in human lives, the cost to our budget, probably 100 billion. We could have probably brought down that statue for a lot less.

The president led us into the Iraq war on the basis of unproven assertions without evidence; he embraced a radical doctrine of pre-emptive war unprecedented in our history; and he failed to build a true international coalition.

And I have lived since - as you have - in a period of cold war, during which we have ensured by our achievements in the science and technology of destruction that a third act in this tragedy of war will result in the peace of extinction.

As a civilian during the Second War, I was exposed to danger in circumstances which removed any distinction between the man in and the man out of uniform.

It has too often been too easy for rulers and governments to incite man to war.

As a soldier, I survived World War I when most of my comrades did not.

Until the last great war, a general expectation of material improvement was an idea peculiar to Western man. Now war and its aftermath have made economic and social progress a political imperative in every quarter of the globe.

Today continuing poverty and distress are a deeper and more important cause of international tensions, of the conditions that can produce war, than previously.