Wesley Clark Quotes

Last chances in the Middle East have been two a dirham since the 1950s. Each year the enmities are more profound, the despots more bloodthirsty and clownish, the violence more extreme, and the conditions of ordinary existence more ghastly.

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

I think most of the Washington foreign policy establishment exists in a fantasy world when it comes to Syria. They fundamentally don't understand that Russia and Iran, from the beginning, had much more at stake in Syria than the United States did. Russia and Iran were going to do everything possible in order to keep Bashar al-Assad in power.

Iraq is not about oil.

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.

Israel sees the world just beyond its borders collapsing.

Put simply, the Bush administration policy in the Middle East is continuing to fail.

The need to help spread democracy and the ability to do that will be much greater if we break this addiction to oil, which gives the oil princes and sultans the power in the Mideast.

If Syria collapses completely, the United States and the world would have to consider who, and what, fills the vacuum.

We must do everything we can to be more aggressive in confronting Syria about what they are doing in Iraq.

The long conflict between Israel and Palestine has, for better or worse, become the world's conflict. It permanently destabilizes the Middle East, blocks the settlement of urgent crises, and intensifies looming threats to the West.

The Middle East is undoubtedly in for a rocky time. In Palestine we have a situation which is badly fouled up by the past mistakes of many people, including ourselves. These probably cannot be settled without great unpleasantness, including violence.

Forty million Arabs are going to push four hundred thousand Jews into the sea. And that's all there is to it. Oil—that is the side we ought to be on.

We are caught in the Middle East in supporting the bad guys in order to get rid of the worse guys.

The Middle East does not follow Las Vegas rules. Whatever happens in the Middle East affects the rest of the world.

The conflict in the Middle East is complex, multi-faceted, and unlikely to be resolved anytime soon.

I'm no apologist for Russia or the Assad regime, but actually, this has been staring us in the face for a number of years now, and I think it's time to turn a page and accept reality. Our strategy - if that is the right word - failed miserably, and Russia's with Iran has been successful.

If Israel did not exist, the United Nations would go out of business.

The Iranian regime, in my mind, is the single most enduring threat to stability and peace in the Middle East.

In Syria, Vladimir pUTIN sees the chance to make millions of refugees and weaponise them. The US has to take a lead in defending the values of the free world.

United States military involvement in Syria has deepened since President Trump took office.

There is little doubt that an unstable Syria will destabilize the whole Middle East.

Washington sees the various local and national conflicts in the Middle East as part of a battle for regional hegemony between the U.S. and Iran.

I'm proud of what I've done in Jordan, but the region itself is sitting on a time bomb.

The United States is the most powerful nation on Earth and it just can't walk away from the Middle East and central Asia and the Horn of Africa.