Bashir Assad Quotes

It is totally unacceptable for a government to interfere in the internal affairs of another government and send aid, money, and weapons, to the people who are against a certain regime in another country.

Iran is part of the problem, not the solution. And the Russian government is ignoring reality.

The threat that Syria might transfer more advanced weapons to Hezbollah has existed for a long time.

We fought the Syrians 15 years to protect our independent decision-making and escape hegemony. Where's the independent decision? Is it with the Egyptian regime? Instead of going through Egypt, why don't we go through Syria? In Egypt we say our capital is Gaza, but in Damascus we say the capital of the Palestinian state is Jerusalem

Nations want the United States to fight their wars, until they go bad.

The Syrian Intervention was aimed not only at strengthening Assad's position but at forcing the United States to deal with Moscow on a more even footing.

Lebanon cannot resolve a question like Hezbollah which is in Syria, Iraq, everywhere because of Iran. It is a regional political solution that needs to be done.

We have no vital national interest in Syria's civil war.

Hezbollah is in Syria and Iraq and Yemen, so people should not focus on Hezbollah that it's a Lebanese entity only, but it's something regional.

I think most of the Washington foreign policy establishment exists in a fantasy world when it comes to Syria. They fundamentally don't understand that Russia and Iran, from the beginning, had much more at stake in Syria than the United States did. Russia and Iran were going to do everything possible in order to keep Bashar al-Assad in power.

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.

When you talk about cooperation, it means cooperation between two legal governments, not cooperation between foreign government and any faction within Syria.

I think we've, again, got to be extremely careful; otherwise we'll misunderstand what's going on in Iraq and in Syria today. Of course, you can't say that those of us who removed Saddam in 2003 bear no responsibility for the situation in 2015.

The great powers have dominated the destiny of the Islamic countries for years and installed the Zionist cancerous tumor in the heart of the Islamic world. Many of the problems facing the Muslim world are due to the existence of the Zionist regime.

Syria will remain a hotbed of terrorism as long as the civil war, aided and abetted by the Iranians and the Russians, continue.

The minute we leave south Lebanon we will have to erase the word Hezbollah from our vocabulary, because the whole idea of the State of Israel versus Hezbollah was sheer folly from the outset. It most certainly no longer will be relevant when Israel returns to her internationally recognized northern border.

In the past, foreign intervention was obviously a major problem. Foreign domination, or if not domination, interference. But that has ended. There is no foreign domination; there is minimal foreign interference. The Cold War has ended. The Soviet Union no longer exists. The United States is showing minimal and diminishing interest in the Muslim world. They now have to confront their own problems. The old excuses are gone. The old justifications are gone and therefore the anger of people is turning increasingly against their own rulers.

Iran is obviously part of the problem. They sponsor Hezbollah. They encourage a radical brand of Islam.

So long as the international community consists of sovereign states, war between them remains a possibility, of which all governments have to take reasonable account.

One has to be willing to face the fact that what has transpired in Iraq is not exactly a very successful exercise.

I think the US and UK thought if they gave a bit more time to Israel, they would crush Hezbollah. But it became very obvious that was an unwinnable war.

A huge national security state has developed in the United States since World War II. Its function is to buttress anticommunist, procapitalist governments and undermine and destroy popular movements whenever possible.

We've just let too many things happen. And now, try to turn around and fix it. Getting involved in a [Syria] civil war directly was never something I thought made sense.

What I'd do is not have USAID and the National Endowment for Democracy working with U.S. taxpayers' money to knock off an elected government in Ukraine, which is what they did. I wouldn't try to force the people of Ukraine into a deal with NATO against their interest or into a deal with the European Union, which is against their economic interest.

Government is not the answer to the problem - it IS the problem.