Fareed Zakaria Quotes

The paradox of American policy in the Middle East — promoting democracy on the assumption it will bring countries closer to the West — is that almost everywhere there are free elections, the American-backed side tends to lose.

The west has a great deal to answer for in the Middle East, from Britain's belated empire-building after the First World War to the US and British policy that condemns modern Iraq to the material and social squalor of a half-century ago.

Anybody who believes that we can democratize Iran, Iraq and Syria by military force is living in a fantasy world.

I don't think it's the job of the United States to build democracies from whole cloth. That's Wilsonianism to me of the most crazy kind.

The U.S. military will be stepping into a morass. Iraq presents as unpromising a breeding ground for democracy as any in the world. It has never really known democracy or even legitimate, centralized rule for any great duration.

Every time we have toppled a secular dictator (in the Middle East), it has been replaced by a chaos and the rise of radical Islam…. Intervention has unintended consequences

Back in the 1950s, America set out to intervene in Syria, liberate the people from a corrupt elite, and bring about a new democracy. They did this with the best of intentions, but it led to disaster. And out of that disaster, the Assad regime rose to power.

After installing friendly leaders in Iran and Guatemala, the United States lost interest in promoting democracy in either country.

I just think everything we do has an unintended consequence. We take out Saddam Hussein in Iraq, and Iraq was the check against Iran.

Therefore, once U.S. forces leave, it is almost inevitable that an anti-Western, anti-U.S. regime will arise.

We're not going to spread democracy at the business end of a M16 held by a 23 year old Marine.

Our country is being bled daily in an effort to create a democracy in a place where it never existed.

It is overly optimistic to think that we can take a country that has emerged from under a totalitarian regime with its institutions of civil society and create a beacon of democracy within five years. If we try to transform Iraq into a democracy, we will need more and more troops over time because we will have to quell nationalistic revolts.

The concepts of "democracy promotion" and "transformational diplomacy" pursued by the George W. Bush Administration conditioned interstate relations on altering any system of government that did not match Washington's understanding of democracy.

We've gone too far in thinking we can re-create an American democratic paradise in the Middle East.

I don't think it's hypothetical whether or not it's a good idea to topple secular dictators in the Middle East and hope to get a good outcome and hope that stability comes thereafter.

I profoundly do not believe that the United States could make things better in Syria by being there. And we have an evidentiary record of what happens when we're there - nearly a decade in Iraq.

Iraq is part of a legitimate American effort not to have democracy everywhere but to have democracy somewhere.

A central claim of the Bush administration's foreign policy is that the spread of democracy in the Middle East is the cure for terrorism.

People make mistakes. And one of the mistakes that the United States consistently made was that it could intervene and somehow adjust people's governments, especially in the Middle East.

When you decide to get involved in a military operation in a place like Syria, you've got to be prepared, as we learned from Iraq and Afghanistan, to become the government, and I'm not sure any country, either the United States or I don't hear of anyone else, who's willing to take on that responsibility.

I argued that the Bush administration, and the Coalition officials more recently, didn't understand Iraqi society. They thought it was a blank slate, that they could use Iraqis as guinea pigs.

I don’t think America wants democracies in the Middle East. They wouldn’t be nearly as friendly to us

Democratization is not necessarily the best way to fight Islamic extremism, because the transition to democracy has been found to be an especially vulnerable period for states across the board.

We should not act as if we were an imperialist power, willy-nilly moving into capitals in that part of the world, taking down governments.