Top 77 Richard Engel Quotes

What is the Obama Doctrine? It seems to be one of disengagement, to try to ignore the hot, religious, dry, poor countries from Algeria to Pakistan.

Israel specifically does not want Syria to hand over weapons, chemical or conventional, to Hezbollah.

Egypt has a devout population. People go out, they pray, they fast.

Every country where the the United States maintains troops has a status of forces agreement.

There is no Afghan Awakening Movement.

The Muslim Brotherhood is a fundamentalist group.

Anyone who follows the Middle East and Islamic world in general can’t deny it is often a very violent place, that a band of instability now stretches from Algeria to Pakistan.

The Taliban may pine for a pre-industrial society, but most Afghans do not.

Osama Bin Laden is dead. Killed not by a massive troop deployment but by a commando raid carried out by a few dozen highly trained men and helicopters.

Iraq was home of the Abbasid Caliphate, a golden age when the Muslim world was at the forefront of math, science and medicine.

President Bashar Assad’s regime is in the unique position of being targeted both by Israel and supporters of al Qaeda.

For eight years, you had the Bush administration with a very interventionist policy, driving into world affairs, driving primarily into the Islamic world, army first or fist first.

There are clearly many Egyptian free-thinkers and intellectuals – lots of wonderful Egyptian artists and architects and scientists.

Every war has revolutionary justice.

Some Iraqi troops aren’t willing to fight for their government. But many Shiites appear willing to fight for their religious leaders.

The Muslim Brotherhood is much more hardline than Turkish Islamists.

Israel sees the world just beyond its borders collapsing.

Bhutto’s regime is remembered for having one of the worst human rights records in Pakistan’s history, and her government did not allow the media freedoms she criticizes Musharraf for crushing.

9/11 was a terrible, horrific, tragic day.

Afghanistan does have an air force: It has two C-130s. I saw one of them. It was nice, a gift from the United States. But two planes don’t even make a Caribbean charter airline, let alone an air force for a country at war.

Lebanon does not have a powerful army.

The dangers of an Afghan collapse are many: Afghan deaths, a loss of American prestige, a loss of NATO prestige, a moral blow to U.S. troops and veterans, a Taliban resurgence, huge setbacks for women, and greater power for Pakistan and Pakistani extremists.

Women, who enjoyed a high social status and levels of education under Saddam, saw terrible setbacks as Iraq fell into civil war. As a result of the sectarian violence from 2005-2007, women retreated to their homes and fell from public view.

Persia is 7,000 years old and will fight to survive.

Faced with the crippling sanctions, Iran could simply decide it is paying too high a cost to pursue its nuclear program and could opt for negotiations and reconciliation with the United States and other members of the international community. This is clearly the preferred option of American leaders.

There weren’t many weapons in Egypt in the 1990s. Police controls on guns were very strict back then. That is no longer the case in Egypt today.

Rockets fired by the Taliban generally aren’t guided.

Mali exists mostly to itself. Few people go there. Few Malians leave. Most of Mali’s 13 million people live, and seem to live quite happily, off the rice, corn and millet they grow and the long-horn cattle and goats they keep.

When you look at Syria, and you look at all the militant groups on the ground, there are many groups in Syria that could pose a threat to the United States, not just Khorasan.

We’re all bloggers and punks and rebels with cameras. There is absolutely no respect for career journalists anymore.

Putin believes Russia is back, and he may be right.

I have seen heroics – soldiers saving other soldiers’ lives – and horrors.

Traditionally, all the kings of Saudi Arabia have been sons of the founder of Saudi Arabia, and they’ve gone from one son to the next.

A nuclear program has arguably worked as a deterrent for North Korea and other states – would Moammar Gadhafi have been deposed and summarily killed if Libya had had nuclear weapons? Iranians might not think so.

If Syria collapses completely, the United States and the world would have to consider who, and what, fills the vacuum.

When I first arrived in Baghdad in January 2003, I thought I would soon rent a house and envisioned myself swimming in the Tigris to cool off after reporting in the city the caliphs called Madinit al-Salam, the City of Peace. A year later, I realized I wouldn’t be taking any midnight dips – Madinat al-Salam no more.

The United States encouraged Iraqis to rise up after Saddam Hussein’s army was driven out of Kuwait. Washington assumed Saddam was weak after losing the 1991 Gulf War. Iraqis rose up, but Saddam’s troops killed thousands – Iraqis say tens of thousands – in a counter-offensive.

In popular Egyptian and regional culture, women are seen as weak, easy victims to temptation in the same way Eve couldn’t resist that shiny apple in the Garden of Eden.

President George W. Bush, in his now-rare public appearances and interviews, still refuses to acknowledge he did anything to help Iran. But it doesn’t really matter what he thinks.

Israel is becoming a fortress. Fences along the borders with Egypt, Lebanon, and Syria.

When students and liberals initially occupied Tahrir Square, it looked like it might be a passing thing.

The U.S. spent billions of dollars to build a secular, professional national Iraqi army but failed because, despite all the U.S.-supplied guns, tanks and planes, the Iraqi military fell apart when challenged by a band of terrorists.

Shaped like Texas, but twice as big, Mali is one of the poorest countries in the world. It exports almost nothing – mostly just cotton, gold and livestock – and doesn’t have enough money to import much of anything, either.

It’s probably time to end the global war on terrorism.

If Israel sees weapons moving toward its border, it acts.

The U.S. spent years and years and billions of dollars to build the Iraqi army only to watch it collapse and hand over so many of its weapons.

Each time there is a conflict between Israel and Gaza, accusations fly over who started it, each side blaming the other.

For many foreign fighters, the jihad in Iraq and Syria is a commuter war.

Based on the people l’ve spoken to, I think the impression is: Is America safer from Al Qaeda? Yes. Is America weaker as a nation because we have overspent and over-focused on Al Qaeda? Yes. I think that would be the conclusion that people seem to have come to and that I tend to agree with.

Staying in a very public fight with the U.S. is exactly what Al Qaeda wants.

Egypt is the most populous Arab nation, the seat of Sunni Islamic doctrine, and has tremendous political, religious and social influence on the rest of the region. For better or worse, it will lead the rest of the Middle East by example. So goes Egypt, so goes the region.

In October 2008, American commandos launched a cross-border raid into Syria to capture an Islamic militant known as Abu Ghadiya. He was accused of being one of al Qaeda in Iraq’s main smugglers of fighters and money between Iraq and Syria.

I don’t think I’m invincible.

ISIS is in many ways a creation of the Syrian regime.

It seems nothing good comes out of Abu Ghraib.

Hamas is a Palestinian political party with an aggressive militant wing.

In the 1990s, Islamists in Algeria won elections like the Brotherhood did in Egypt. The Algerian military refused to allow the Islamists to take power. A war erupted, killing between 100,000 to 200,000 people, depending on which estimates are to be believed.

Syrians need to prepare for the aftermath if the Assad regime falls. Atrocities that could be considered war crimes have been committed in this country, and Syrians should rightly demand that the perpetrators be held accountable.

War can be fun for certain people. It’s a magnet for sadists, losers, and angry dreamers.

The Muslim Prophet Mohammed was a big believer in charity and firmly established helping those in need as a basis of the religion.

Not surprisingly, in most Sunni regions there has little appetite for free U.S.-sponsored elections.

Turkey wants to see Bashar al-Assad go and wants to kind of expand its sphere of influence into Turkey so its Ottoman glory or Ottoman past are once again project into the Syrian provinces. That’s kind of what Turkey’s vision is.

Egypt has a presidential system. The president runs the state. Who the president is matters profoundly.

War does horrible things to human beings, to societies. It brings out the best, but most often the worst, in our human nature.

For decades, Saddam and his Sunni minority had imposed their will on Iraq, carrying on a 14-century tradition of Sunnis controlling Mesopotamia despite a Shiite majority.

You gotta love the names. They’re so eager, earnest, and hopeful: Camp Prosperity, Camp Liberty, and Camp Victory are the names of just a few of the U.S. military bases in Baghdad.