Michael Scheuer Quotes

The war on terror, rebranded under Obama as the "Overseas Contingency Operation," has morphed into war on democracy.

Overseas, America's fighting men and women have been waging war against those who would attack America and plunge the world into a period of darkness, and their success can easily be seen.

War on terrorism defines the central preoccupation of the United States in the world today, and it does reflect in my view a rather narrow and extremist vision of foreign policy of the world's first superpower, of a great democracy, with genuinely idealistic traditions.

My submission to you is we're fighting the war on terror not overseas but in our own streets, and we'd be spending vast more fortunes to try to be a defensive country to protect ourselves rather than an offensive country to spread democracy wherever people yearn for it.

Those are serious questions of war and peace, of freedom or tyranny, whether or not there is ever going to be a hope of us instilling some democratic systems in a part of the world that frankly is breeding hate and destruction directed right at us.

Even though the Bush campaign ad tells you that Afghanistan is a new democracy at the Olympics because of Bush's efforts, Afghanistan hasn't actually had an election.

Only idiots would believe that the U.S. is a democratic country seeking democracy in other countries

Now that Washington once again has a tangible adversary -- variously described as ‘freedom-hating terrorists,’ ‘Salafist jihadis,’ or ‘Islamofascists’ -- U.S. leaders have convinced the American public that foreign policy is an ‘us-versus-them’ contact sport in which the primary tactics are military and coercive

The Bush administration's approach to the war on terror collided badly with another of its doctrines, spreading democracy in the Middle East as a panacea to reduce radicalism.

If the war on terror is endless, you could forget about democracy.

The United States has been essentially engaged in an ongoing war that most people date from 2001. That war has taken us to Afghanistan, to Iraq, in a lesser way to other countries - Libya, Somalia, Yemen.

In 2001, we were told that the war in Afghanistan was a feminist mission. The marines were liberating Afghan women from the Taliban. Can you really bomb feminism into a country? And now, after 25 years of brutal war - 10 years against the Soviet occupation, 15 years of US occupation - the Taliban is riding back to Kabul and will soon be back to doing business with the United States.

And above all, what does being liberal have to do with opposing, or, uh, supporting the war against terror? Our enemies in the war against terror are so anti-liberal that you would think it would be liberals leaping to protect the world from these monstrous ideologies.

The idea of foreign policy realism, I think, fits more neatly with President Trump. And with John McCain, the neoconservative label of let's make the world safe for democracy and we're going to topple every regime hasn't worked.

When George W.Bush attacked Afghanistan, it was widely hailed, and the failure of our war there wasn't understood. Within a few months of attacking Afghanistan, Bush clearly moved on to get ready for Iraq, long before Osama bin Laden or Al Qaeda were dispensed with. There was never any serious debate in the press about whether even the notion that every Taliban was our enemy was valid. A lot of assumptions about that war were never challenged.

People say the war in Iraq is a bad war, and the war in Afghanistan is a good war, but what's the difference between them? Democratic people around the world cannot accept that this is a good war. This is just endless war.

We do have to take the long-term view. And long term, the question to ask ourselves is whether America should attack others pre-emptively, whether she should embroil herself in wars far away from our soil, and try to bring democracy by force to the rest of the world.

Continuous wars - which we have now had since 2001 - starting with Afghanistan, continuing on to Iraq. And even since Iraq, it's been more or less continuous. The appalling war in Libya, which has wrecked that country and wrecked that part of the world, and which isn't over by any means. The indirect Western intervention in Syria, which has created new monsters. These are policies, which if carried out by any individual government, would be considered extremist. Now, they're being carried out collectively by the United States, backed by some of the countries of the European Union.

Most people think the Iraq war has increased the probability of an attack. However, it's difficult to put this aspect into financial terms.

I share the Presidents commitment to fighting and winning the war on terrorism.

It's very important to understand that World War II is at the base of this new policy. From the 1890s on, the U.S. was always imperialistic. We went after the Philippines, and we did the same in Cuba, in Hawaii. We controlled South America. Woodrow Wilson was not what he was supposed to be. He was very much a white man first. "The world must be made safe for democracy." It really accelerates after World War II.

Day by day, it's worse for my people, especially for the women. And that's why, because of all of these main reasons, we say this is the mockery of democracy and mockery of War on Terror.

America is always fighting. We're the one that wants to go to World War III with Russia over Ukraine. So we're the ones always fighting. We're the ones putting up a lot of the money for NATO disproportionately - a lot.

The fight against radical Islamic terrorists and ISIS has been called the war of our time.

Another argument holds that opposing Saddam Hussein would cause even greater troubles in that part of the world, and interfere with the larger war against terror. I believe the opposite is true.