Seyyed Hossein Nasr Quotes

In beloved Iraq, blood is flowing between brothers, in the shadow of an illegitimate foreign occupation.

… the independent Afghan government that followed the ouster of the Taliban descended into catastrophic corruption, incompetence, and double-dealing, and many Afghans blamed American intervention for the mess in their country.

The Western world doesn't really give enough credit to the importance in history of the Soviet invasion and the subsequent war in Afghanistan. For us it was a sideshow of the Cold War. For the Islamic world it was an unprovoked infidel invasion of a Muslim country not unlike Iraq.

If I look at the really important questions in [Middle East] region, I see Iran, where there is a strong desire for a freer society and where people are repressed by a small group of ayatollahs. I see Syria, where we can see a similar desire of the people to be free. These two countries fund Hezbollah and other terrorist organizations and are hurting our efforts in Afghanistan and have been extremely harmful in Iraq. Then I also see large, important countries such as Egypt and Saudi Arabia.

The Afghans are probably the world champions in resisting foreign domination and infiltration into their country.

Afghanistan was always a backwater in the Islamic world.

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.

Our army is really an imperial army…. We used to wonder why British imperialists went to Iraq and Afghanistan.

Iraq is a terrible place. Some fool American is going to come out here and try to redesign it

The Afghans are scared. Some are scared that the Americans will leave. Some are scared that the Americans will not leave. They are scared of the Taliban. They are scared of predatory government.

The United States, as all you know, did not come to Iraq for oil, not to occupy. We came here only to help.

The Taliban has asked Osama bin Laden to voluntarily leave the country.They said they delivered him a note asking him to leave, which is a pretty goodtrick considering they claim they don't even know where he is.

I mean, you can agree or disagree with Iraq or Afghanistan, but by the way, now the great campaigning cause out there is the absence of intervention in Syria. And then in Libya, it's partial intervention. And that doesn't really explain why some countries that have literally nothing to do with the interventions in the Middle East end up getting targeted.

These people are trying to shake the will of the Iraqi citizens, and they want us to leave...I think the world would be better off if we did leave.

It's fair to say average Americans think that the average Afghan doesn't want American troops in their country.

The question becomes what kind of coalition can we build that will make a transition and empower the people of Iraq? The American soldiers' presence there is an act of provocation. There's a big red ball on the back of every American soldier in that country, so our being there contributes to the crisis, it does not resolve the crisis.

If the military contractors are out of Afghanistan, Karzai is out 15 minutes later.

Iraqis are sick of foreign people coming in their country and trying to destabilize their country.

Because no matter how much money we spend there [in Iraq], as long as the people there see this money as... as assistance that is unwelcome, as long as they continue to be humiliated in their own country by us... I mean, the future looked bleak, and the future after that was in fact very bleak.

The great powers have dominated the destiny of the Islamic countries for years and installed the Zionist cancerous tumor in the heart of the Islamic world. Many of the problems facing the Muslim world are due to the existence of the Zionist regime.

Hillary Clinton has made bad judgment not only on taxes. She's made bad judgments on Libya, on Syria, on Iraq. I mean, her and Obama, whether you like it or not, the way they got out of Iraq, the vacuum they've left, that's why ISIS formed in the first place. They started from that little area, and now they're in 32 different nations, Hillary. Congratulations. Great job.

If we had allowed things to drift, everything would have gone from bad to worse. Nasser would have become a kind of Moslem Mussolini, and our friends in Iraq, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and even Iran would gradually have been brought down. His efforts would have spread westwards, and Libya and North Africa would have been brought under his control.

We [Afghanistan government] were in the process of cleaning up the government when these attacks happened in the north - not only in Kunduz, but also in other provinces. Our special forces are limited - we cannot be everywhere at the same time and we had to defend every district regardless of how insignificant it might be, because of the very social and political makeup of this country.

It's not fair that a Palestinian child cannot grow up in a state of their own, living their entire lives in the presence of a foreign army that controls the movements of the parents every single day.

I have made it clear that we will hunt down terrorists who threaten our country, wherever they are. That means I will not hesitate to take action against ISIL in Syria, as well as Iraq. This is a core principle of my presidency: if you threaten America, you will find no safe haven.