Adam Michnik Quotes

Four years ago, I promised to end the war in Iraq. We did. I promised to refocus on the terrorists who actually attacked us on 9/11. We have. We've blunted the Taliban's momentum in Afghanistan, and in 2014, our longest war will be over. A new tower rises above the New York skyline, al Qaeda is on the path to defeat, and Osama bin Laden is dead.

After America won the Cold War, some believed we had come to the 'end of history,' and budget-cutters celebrated the so-called 'peace dividend.' As a result, we ignored the toxic mixture of militant Islam and terror that ultimately led to 9/11.

Our country was hit on 9/11, 2001. Everybody in the world knows that. It hasn't been easy to deal with a different kind of enemy, but that is what we have, a different kind of enemy.

If you will remember history correctly, even the Second World War was perpetrated by a stateless actor, by murdering the Prince Rudolf, if you remember. And so is the case with 9/11. It was a stateless actor which has made the world go to war.

What bin Laden had hoped to achieve in Afghanistan in the post-9/11 period, which was to drag the United States into a protracted guerrilla war like the one he had fought against the Soviets, never happened. Instead, that protracted guerrilla war is now playing out in Iraq, in the heart of the Middle East.

If, for a moment, it seemed that September 11th could be identified with Iraq, the illusion was short-lived.

When terrorists blew up the Marine barracks in Lebanon, Reagan was frustrated and furious, as Bush was after 9/11. But he didn't stick us in a war in the Middle East with no exit.

So a truthful assessment of how America is doing in the war on terror as a result of President Bush's war on Iraq is that we have been set back by decades.

It was Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda who attacked the U.S. on September 11, 2001, not Saddam Hussein and Iraq.

My time as editor has been overlapped by a crisis - a prolonged, labyrinthine, tragic, seemingly non-ending crisis - that involves the prehistory of 9/11, 9/11, Iraq, Afghanistan, fraught histories between the United States and almost everyone.

Iraq did nothing to us. Iraq was not responsible for 9/11.

George Bush didn't campaign on, 'If you elect me, I'm going to be a great president to confront terrorism and launch a war in the Middle East' because nobody was thinking about it in the year 2000. But it became the defining issue of his presidency.

After 9/11, we did see Palestinian terrorism in the context of all terrorism.

We live in a world where terror has become a too familiar part of our vocabulary. The terror of 9/11, in which al-Qaeda's attacks on America launched the nation into three wars - against Iraq, Afghanistan, and the Islamic State.

The sheik is, thank God, still alive and this hurts Bush who promised to his people to kill Osama.

'The war in Iraq - if Osama was a Christian - it's the Christmas present he never would have expected.

Before 9/11, absolutely, there were concerns about terrorism; but the world fundamentally changed.

For us, the death of Osama bin Laden is a time of profound reflection. With his death, we remember and mourn all the lives lost on September 11. We remember and mourn all the lives lost in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan. We remember and mourn the death of our soldiers.

They have called Operation Iraqi Freedom a war of choice that isn't part of the real war on terror. Someone should tell that to al Qaeda.

There's no connection between al-Qaeda and Iraq.

We would be hard pressed to find a majority of any country in the world who admired the United States the way they did from World War I up until the day we went into Iraq.

Saddam Hussein and people like him were very much involved in 9/11.

As Michael Scheuer, who ran the C.I.A.'s bin Laden unit until 1999, has pointed out, if bin Laden believed in Christmas, the Iraq war would be his perfect present from Santa Claus. The 9/11 attacks and the subsequent war in Afghanistan severely damaged bin Laden's organization.

The Taliban didn't attack us on 9/11 - Al-Qaeda did. That's why I and other people joined the military - to go after Al Qaeda. Not the Taliban.

Writers are not obliged to deal with current events, but it happens that the big story of our times - the al-Qaida attacks on New York and the Pentagon, and the subsequent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan - is being told in some of the greatest books of our time.