John Updike Quotes

I've said before: If Osama bin Laden was a Christian, Iraq was the Christmas present he always wanted but never expected his parents to give. It validated for the Muslim world virtually all of bin Laden's rhetoric. He had always said the Americans will destroy any strong Muslim regime, and we did.

At the end of the day, Osama bin Laden's interest is not Washington and New York, it's the Middle East. He wants Saudi Arabia. He wants to get rid of the House of Saud. There's a great deal of resentment, even inside the royal family, at the continued military presence of the United States there.

Osama bin Laden is going after us to get us out of the region, so he can deal with the regimes that he sees in the region, or replace them with purists.

Bin Laden didn't come from the abstract. He came from somewhere, and if you look where ... you'll see America's hand of villainy.

Can you imagine what Bush would say if someone like Hugo Chavez asked him for a little piece of land to install a military base, and he only wanted to plant a Venezuelan flag there?

President Bush's war on Iraq is viewed broadly in Islamic communities as an attack on Islam, and thus the President has alienated a large part of one fifth of the world's population.

We here in Egypt are fed up with U.S. colonialism.

Our actions in the Middle East over the last 15 years have already guaranteed radical Muslims quite enough ammunition to kill Americans for the next century, even if Guantanamo did not exist.

How can you call upon us to abolish the clash of civilizations, while America violently attacks Muslims in Iraq, in Afghanistan, and in all corners of the world? …. America is interfering in our religion, in our traditions and in our privacies. This contradicts the Koranic verse: "They will not stop fighting you until they turn you back from your faith if they can.

The Iraqis have a country that inherited cultures thousands of years old while the Americans have a culture only two hundred years old. Two hundred years will teach thousands of years? Oh Americans, leave Iraq for its people.

What takes place in America today was caused by the flagrant interference on the part of successive American governments into others’ business. These governments imposed regimes that contradict the faith, values, and lifestyle of the people.

Should President Clinton have killed Osama bin Laden when he had the opportunity in 1990s? Should President Bush have sent the U.S. military into Iraq to depose Saddam Hussein in 2003? Should President Obama have withdrawn all troops from Iraq in 2011? Such questions provide no real insight into future considerations.

To Barack Obama and the American Left, the 'imperialist' West is always guilty, and so, radical Islam is seen as at least half right in attacking Western values and institutions.

I don't know anything about Osama Bin Laden that doesn't come to me through the filter of the West and its propaganda.

I'm afraid you're gonna have to see more American military involvement in order to keep ISIS from spreading even further.

Yemen is a symbol of our continued military hubris in the Middle East - an addiction Obama was supposed to cure but didn't.

I mean, the United States has had an eighteen-year military commitment in Afghanistan, and frankly, I can't think of any country other than the United States which is even capable of such a commitment.

I profoundly do not believe that the United States could make things better in Syria by being there. And we have an evidentiary record of what happens when we're there - nearly a decade in Iraq.

It's easy to say, let's go in and get the bad guys. But you have a divided country of Sunnis and Shias. The United States goes and takes action there on behalf of the Iraqi government. You've got Iran coming in and saying we're going to stand with Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki, so now we're aligning ourselves with Iran, and if we do air strikes, becoming de facto air force for them.

The United States has been essentially engaged in an ongoing war that most people date from 2001. That war has taken us to Afghanistan, to Iraq, in a lesser way to other countries - Libya, Somalia, Yemen.

This cannot be the United States being the air force for Shia militias, or a Shia on Sunni Arab fight.

The Arab rulers are basically unpopular. They are supported by the United States against the wishes of their people. In all of this rather heady mixture of violence and policies that are remarkably unpopular right down to the last iota, it's not hard for demagogues, especially people who claim to speak in the name of religion, in this case Islam, to raise a crusade against the United States and say that we must somehow bring America down.

I think we have to knock out ISIS. Right now Syria is fighting ISIS. We have people who want to fight both at the same time. But Syria is no longer Syria; Syria is Russia and Iran, who she made strong, and Kerry and Obama made into a very powerful nation and very rich nation very, very quickly. Very, very quickly. I believe we have to get ISIS.

And now the really difficult part: We have to rebuild Iraq into a strong and independent nation that will one day hate the United States.

Shaking up whole region means that Israel needs the US for its safety and military camps are "flourishing" everywhere in the Middle East. It has been said that Barack Obama is less interested in the Middle East. I don't think so. This mess has been created and maintained. Maybe the US is pretending to be less interested, however, it allows them to take their power back when it comes to security.