Words matter. These are the best Elliott Abrams Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
The fake republics are goners; the monarchies have a fighting chance. That’s my conclusion after a short visit to the Middle East and discussions with officials and analysts there.
For decades, the Arab states have seemed exceptions to the laws of politics and human nature. While liberty expanded in many parts of the globe, these nations were left behind, their ‘freedom deficit’ signaling the political underdevelopment that accompanied many other economic and social maladies.
In 2004, President Bush gave Prime Minister Sharon certain guarantees about American policy, but the Obama administration treated those as a kind of private letter having no binding policy impact.
Needless to say, if the Arab-Israeli conflict is about interstate disputes and the need to resolve the future of the West Bank and Gaza, it can be solved; if it is a religious conflict, nothing but violence is ahead.
Two presidents pursued human rights policies that were serious and effective: Reagan and George W. Bush. They understood that American support for human rights activists is a moral imperative for us and also makes the world safer for us.
Does anyone believe that Kofi Annan scares Bashar Assad?
Pinochet took power in a 1973 military coup that the United States supported.
The anchors of the Arab consensus have long been Egypt and Saudi Arabia, and both are now weakened forces in Arab politics and diplomacy.
A Palestinian state will never be created by terror.
If Iran gets a nuclear weapon, its influence and that of Hamas and Hezbollah are strengthened.
Pessimism is rife in Israel.
The devastation of the ancient Christian community in Iraq is well known.
Those who cannot remember the past are condemned, it seems, to direct the Middle East policy of the Obama administration.
While Israelis do not care too much about Europeans moral judgments, the E.U. is an important market for them, and European sanctions of any kind would be harmful to Israel.
I want to be the first guy to reverse a communist revolution.
The Right is simply more pro-Israel than the Left.
The ransoming of captives has been practiced by Jews for many centuries and has been regarded as a greater obligation than charity for the poor.
The Arab view that someone should bomb Iran and stop it from developing nuclear weapons is familiar to anyone who meets privately with Arab leaders, especially in the Gulf.
The raids on Freedom House, the National Democratic Institute and International Republican Institute, the Adenauer Foundation, and other groups helping Egyptians move toward respect for democratic politics and human rights were of a piece with the practices of Hosni Mubarak – only bolder and more repressive.
It’s time to bury the unreal, failed ‘realism’ of those who have long thought that dictators brought stability.
Tunisian liberals say that the U.S. Embassy in Tunis is unengaged with their efforts to make sure the Tunisian model remains one of expanding freedom.
During most of the Bush administration, human rights and democracy in Egypt were on the front burner.
The Obama administration appears to regard intelligence leaks and briefings more or less like briefings by the Democratic National Committee or White House flack Jay Carney. You use any information at hand, classified or not, and you spin it any way you like, fairly or not.
The attack on the British embassy in Tehran came just days after the Iranian ‘parliament’ voted to expel the British ambassador, and therefore reeks of official complicity.
American power remains today what it was in the Second World War and the Cold War: the greatest force for freedom in the world.
I grew up in Queens, in New York City, in a middle class Jewish family. My mother was a public school teacher, my father was a lawyer. They were Democrats – kind of middle-of-the-road democrats.
The Egyptian military plays positive and negative roles in Egypt, but the most significant single thing it did under Mubarak was to guarantee an Islamist victory once he left the scene.
Persecution of Christians is growing around the world, and Congress needs to pay more attention to it.
During the election campaign of 2000, it was generally thought that then-governor Bush didn’t know much about foreign policy or national security affairs, and that Colin Powell would lead on that front, while the president’s main concern would be domestic.
Reformist kings can save their dynasties now by helping their countries move smoothly into democracy, or they will end their years in exile like the Russian aristocrats of a century earlier.
While all Alawites fear vengeance against their entire community should Assad fall, there are varying degrees of loyalty to the Assads.
Israel and the Palestinians had been at the table together for decades until the Obama/Mitchell/Rahm Emanuel decision to demand a total end to Israeli construction froze not the settlements but the diplomacy.
The United States already has in place comprehensive trade sanctions against Sudan, imposed because of the regime’s support for terrorism. While we maintain diplomatic relations, we do not staff our embassy there.
Every Arab ‘republic’ has been a republic of fear, but only Saddam Hussein’s Iraq surpassed the Assads’ Syria in number of victims.
For 22 years, Bandar bin Sultan was Saudi Arabia’s influential, irrepressible ambassador in Washington.
The United States should encourage Israel to take further steps to improve the Palestinian economy.
As the Palestinian leadership never seems to pay any penalty for its words, America’s seriousness about the peace process is in doubt.
U.S.-Israel relations are often depicted as an extended honeymoon, but that’s a false image.
There are no Muslim ghettos in the U.S.
First impressions matter. Experts say we size up new people in somewhere between 30 seconds and two minutes.
Scandinavia is boring. People living there apparently have little to do. And as European history teaches, when there is nothing much to do, you may as well amuse yourself by attacking the Jews.
It is a keen measure of the fall of American influence in the region when a Palestinian leader responds to intense American pressure to go to the negotiating table by waiting to see if Arab League foreign ministers will let him take that step.
Israel will not and should not leave until it is clear that the West Bank can be policed by Palestinians and that the region will not be a source of terrorism against Israel, as Gaza and South Lebanon became when Israel left there.
The Assad regime is quite reliant on oil exports.
The Knesset is in Israel, and the Western Wall is in Israel, and the sooner the Obama administration realizes this, the closer it will be to a Middle East policy worthy of our country and its long alliance with our ally in Jerusalem – which is, actually, the capital of the state of Israel.
I don’t see kids with Palm Pilots. They are not common on college campuses, except among professors. Gen Xers don’t need them. They are a phenomenon of the 50-something who can’t remember if his broker’s number ends in 1137 or 3317.
The truce brokered by Egypt between Israel and Hamas depends, above all, on the borders between Egypt, Gaza and Israel.
The presence of jihadis in Syria should be no surprise.
I well remember a leading Egyptian liberal saying to me in 2003 that she did not favor free elections right then in Egypt; she favored them in a decade’s time if she and others had those 10 years to organize freely.
Peace in the Middle East has been on the Obama administration’s mind from the beginning. Two days after his inauguration, the president traveled to the State Department to announce the appointment of George Mitchell as his Middle East peace negotiator.
What does ‘politicizing intelligence’ mean? Using intel, or more often, partial intel, to produce an effect in line with White House policies rather than giving a full picture of a particular situation.
Palestine, as Icelanders see it, includes the Western Wall of the Second Temple, Judaism’s holiest site.
The Obama administration has vastly expanded the use of armed drones and concentrated a great deal of diplomatic effort on building and maintaining alliances that share information about terrorists, provide access to get near them, and then strike against them.
I never said I had no idea about most of the things you said I said I had no idea about.
Pundits are used to analyzing the gap between what our ideals suggest and what our security interests require.
George McGovern and his supporters committed what, in a two-party system, are capital crimes: they did not compromise, they took hard ideological positions, they alienated a large portion of their party’s traditional supporters, and they lost – very, very badly.
The Assad regime has lost the consent of the governed, and it is difficult to see how a replacement Alawite regime would be able to regain this consent.
In the Bill Clinton years, the foreign leader who visited the White House most often was Yasser Arafat – 13 times.
The United States needs to be far clearer: we cannot and will not support any government where Hamas has a real influence and the security forces stop fighting terror.
