Richard Engel Quotes

Bombing Syria will achieve nothing.

It doesn't take much insight to realize that wars have been getting worse every time - worse from the point of view of the civilian, more and more destructive, more and more total.

Images of burning Red Cross and UN buildings struck by US bombs contrasted with images of thousands of desperately poor Afghan women carrying sickly and starving children out of Afghanistan as they flee the might of the US military is tearing at international public confidence in our war against terrorism.

I think that my darkest moment was the Iraq war and the fact that we could not stop it.

While the nature of warfare is changing and wars are moving into cities, they are also becoming longer and their consequences more impactful.

Surely our inaction with respect to Syria is a poor precedent if we're fighting a war on terror.

'Bombing Afghanistan back into the Stone Age' was quite a favourite headline for some wobbly liberals. The slogan does all the work. But an instant's thought shows that Afghanistan is being, if anything, bombed out of the Stone Age.

The question is the morning after. What sort of Iraq do we wake up to after the bombing? What happens in the region? What impact could it have? These are questions leaders I have spoken to have posed.

Sacrificing American soldiers or innocent civilians in an unprecedented preemptive attack on a separate sovereign nation may well prove itself a most temporary medicine.

I don’t care how precise your bombs and weapons of war are. When you set them off, innocent people will die.

I knew we were going to get into this sort of a mess when we went in there. And I don’t see how we’re ever going to get out of it without fighting a major war with the Chinese.

We seem bent on saving the Vietnamese from Ho Chi Minh, even if we have to kill them and demolish their country to do it.

Syria: It’s a messy civil war and we should not be involved in it.

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

There is no denying that the interventionist wars in Iraq and Libya that were propagated as necessary to relieve human suffering actually increased human suffering in those countries - many times over.

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

Iran has basically propped up Assad, who has waged an absolute war of horror against the Syrian people. And he has done anything he could to stay in power with the full support of the Iranians and including Iranian troops and Hezbollah from Lebanon, which are an Iranian proxy.

The American claim that the bombing of North Vietnam was directed against military targets does not withstand direct investigation.

Where are the gains for religious freedom and human rights to justify all the bombings, invasions and wars we have conducted in the lands from Libya to Pakistan - to justify the losses we have endured and the death and suffering we have inflicted?

There's nothing good about Russia's activity in Syria.

Trump has long said he favors a 'safe zone' in Syria to prevent Basher al Assad's regime from carrying out indiscriminate airstrikes against Syrian civilians and to halt the refugee flow out of Syria.

Among the achievements celebrated in Trump's first 100 days are the 59 cruise missiles launched at the Syrian airfield from which the gas attack on civilians allegedly came, and the dropping of the 22,000-pound MOAB bomb in Afghanistan. But what did these bombings accomplish?

A Syrian war would consume Trump's presidency.

Intervening militarily would exacerbate - not resolve - the matter and, in the process, will Americanize the Syrian civil war.

A war between Saudi Arabia and Iran is the beginning of a major catastrophe in the region, and it will reflect very strongly on the rest of the world. For sure, we will not allow any such thing.