Gore Vidal Quotes
Never offend an enemy in a small way.
So far as the Iraq government was concerned the important enemy were the minority Sunni Muslims who had dominated the Shiites before the American Invasion. For America the enemy was Al Qaeda and the terrorists as well as the Sunnis. We ended up fighting Sunnis and even Shiites as the definition of the enemy changed with time.
This is one of the fears of many Israelis—that a Palestinian state with a peace treaty—will just be an opportunity for the Arabs to gain strength and develop their capability to again try and destroy the Jewish state which they have tried to do ever few years until they are defeated and another truce is negotiated.
At the time, some House Republicans had taken an untenable and unpopular position and forced the government to shut down by not passing laws authorizing the expenditures. He had been asked his advice for President Obama who seemed to be winning this particular political squabble.
Eugene Luther Gore Vidal was an American writer and public intellectual known for his epigrammatic wit, patrician manner, and polished style of writing. Vidal was openly bisexual and his novels often dealt with LGBT characters, which was unusual at the time. Beyond literature, Vidal was heavily involved in politics. He twice sought office—unsuccessfully—as a Democratic Party candidate, first in 1960 to the United States House of Representatives (for New York), and later in 1982 to the U.S. Senate (for California).
