Michael Hayden Quotes

Each secession destroys the unity of a nation.

Iraq is falling apart.

I would not be surprised to see Syria break apart entirely.

African history is filled with experiences of people shooting their way to power and then splintering into factions, like in Somalia and Liberia.

Every kingdom divided against itself shall be desolated.

Disunion is the only alternative that is left us

It is unfortunate that there is not a government in Iraq that has been able to unify the Shiites and the Sunnis sufficiently. They are not currently fighting together.

Iraq does have many, many different tensions.

I don't want to be overly dramatic, but Iraq and Syria are gone, and they aren't coming back, at least not as centralized states.

The Sunni militants that make up ISIS are not the underlying problem in Syria and Iraq, but rather they are a symptom of other deeper problems.

Iraq has slipped enough toward dangerous paths that may endanger the country if we don't realize that the solution ... lies is the concept of national unity

Saddam Hussein was not the cause of the problems of Iraq. He was the symptom of the problems of Iraq.

We can either grow together or grow apart. At the moment we are growing apart.

The nation's hoop is broken and scattered. There is no center any longer, and the sacred tree is dead.

There were patriots who supported this war and patriots who opposed it.

Iraq is a terrible place. Some fool American is going to come out here and try to redesign it

We saw Vietnam disintegrating before our eyes—at least the structure of the state disintegrating.

Every Irish person, good or bad, hates to see Ireland divided. But they differ profoundly as to how it should be united.

… far from making one single Republic, this land has reverted to a state of many little republics of towns and localities.

Unfortunately, sometimes our leaders, for their own political purposes, want us to think in terms of categories and groupings. Our group vs. this group vs. another group. This must end.

The Afghans themselves say that if you put two Afghans in a room, you get three factions.

An intelligence officer and historian, Rayburn published a 2014 book, 'Iraq After America,' which is a must-read for anyone who wants to understand how Iraq descended into chaos in the years after the American troop withdrawal at the end of 2011.

I think a lot of folks are beginning to feel that the forces that are tearing us apart in this country are stronger than the forces that tie us together. I don't believe that.

Pakistan is not a unified country.

If anything, what happened in Iraq after the fall of Saddam set back prospects for democratic reform in the region, as many came to associate political change with chaos.