Tulsi Gabbard Quotes

Israeli government & the neocons want US to bomb Iran.

Iran is taking over Iraq. They've been trying to for many, many decades. And now they're finally taking over Iraq. As we sit here, they're taking over Iraq. We get nothing.

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

Syria is no longer Syria. Syria is Russia and it's Iran, who Hillary Clinton made strong and Kerry and Obama made into a very powerful nation and a very rich nation, very, very quickly, very, very quickly.

The big issue is whether the United States will succeed in its venture of reshaping the Middle East. It is not clear to me that using military force is the way to do it. We should not have gone into Iraq. But we have.

What I did warn about when I testified in front of Congress in 2002, I said if you want to worry about a state, it shouldn't be Iraq, it should be Iran. But this government, our administration, wanted to worry about Iraq, not Iran.

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.

I think the Iraq War is not particularly tailored to American interests.

Years ago, I predicted that Iran would take over Iraq. Iran and Iraq used to fight back and forth.

Doesn't it seem awfully strange that the Iraqi government we support is an ally of the Iranians who are our declared enemies? Are we not now supporting the Iranians by propping up their allies in Iraq?

The interference of Iran affects us all.

I think it's reality that Iran is going to have influence in Iraq. All elements of Iraq accepted that.

Russia isn't likely to have any more military success in Syria and Iraq than has the United States.

There has come into being a kind of a Shia belt from Tehran through Baghdad to Beirut. And this gives Iran the opportunity to reconstruct the ancient Persian Empire - this time under the Shia label.

Is the Iranian record of intervention and terror worse than that of the U.S.?

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.

The president has largely taken a hands-off approach in Syria and granted it as a legitimate sphere of interest to countries like Iran and like Russia. This is very bad policy, and it's going to lead to very dangerous consequences for our partners in the region, which is why so many of them are so opposed to U.S. policies.

We're seeing Iran now through the Shia militias in Iraq. We're seeing Iran in Syria; we know the Quds Force is in there.

To the extent that the (ISIS's) advance is a series of urban revolts against the government of PM Nouri al-Maliki, the US would end up bombing ordinary city folk. For the US to be bombing Sunni towns all these years later on behalf of Mr. al-Maliki would be to invite terrorism against the US.

America was the funder of petro-dictatorships. We treated all these countries as basically big, large gas stations: Libya station, Iraq station, Iran station, Egypt station, Syria station, and all we asked of them were three things: Keep your palms open, your prices low and don't bother Israel too much, and you can do whatever you want to your own people.

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.

Whatever the history of U.S. intervention in Iraq, our priorities now should be to protect our people and defend our national security interests, not to try to resolve an intractable religious divide some 1,500 years in the making.

In an odd way, we have really destroyed two of our strongest allies against the Islamists. Saddam Hussein, and we've probably fatally undermined Bashir al Assad in Syria.

I can't take anything off the table. Because you look at some of these countries, you look at North Korea, we're doing nothing there. China should solve that problem for us. China should go into North Korea. China is totally powerful as it relates to North Korea.

The Jews have a powerful ally, America, but they do not really have a bigger family in the same way that there is a European family or an Arab-Muslim family. People who fail to understand this ambivalence will never understand this country. They will not be able to understand how Netanyahu could win the last election by saying the Iranians are coming, Islamic State (IS) is coming, the Arabs are coming, and the whole world hates us anyway.