Elliott Abrams Quotes

Peace in the Middle East has been on the Obama administration's mind from the beginning. Two days after his inauguration, the president traveled to the State Department to announce the appointment of George Mitchell as his Middle East peace negotiator.

I am the Counselor at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.

I do think it's fair to say that there are times when President Obama has not been engaged enough with the Middle East.

Your message is stupid. Iraq is not afraid of you or anyone else when it has a right to claim. What you warned about is not on Iraq's agenda. Iraq is vital and powerful. It is not an opportunistic country. Your administration has not learned from the past.

The Obama administration rarely demonstrated the ability to shift gears and change policy in its first year. Even in the face of historic events such as the continuing demonstrations against Iran's regime, it stuck devotedly to prior plans.

Foreign policy is all about a universe of bad decisions, imperfect decisions; every situation is different. The dynamics, the atmospherics, the people, the pressures, the geopolitical realities shift.

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

Our policies toward Iraq simply are to protect the region and to protect Iraq's people and neighbors.

During the past few years I have led a sometimes hard battle for German foreign policy.

On foreign policy, President Obama has kept our nation safe from terrorism and restored our standing in the world. When it comes to one of our closest allies - Israel - President Obama has been resolute.

I believe the government of the United States should re-examine its policies in the Middle East and adopt a more balanced stance toward the Palestinian cause.

So with the end of the Cold War, it became increasingly obvious that there was no basis upon which any decision was being made, not in the White House, and certainly because of that, not in the Congress.

I have a background and an understanding of what's happened in the Middle East that a lot of people don't have, because there's been no interest.

I met with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in Israel, visited our allies in the Arab Gulf, traveled to Tunisia and Iraq, met with President Petro Poroshenko in Ukraine, and visited our allies in Germany, France, and the United Kingdom.

I think if you're going to master policy, especially world affairs, you've got to know history.

Everyone should unconditionally accept that Israel is an indispensable element of the Middle Eastern mosaic.

Mistakes, after all, are endemic to foreign and military policy given the unpredictability of events and the difficulty of securing reliable information in a place like Iraq.

You can't make war in the Middle East without Egypt and you can't make peace without Syria.

If there is one lesson for U.S. foreign policy from the past 10 years, it is surely that military intervention can seem simple but is in fact a complex affair with the potential for unintended consequences.

Our safety requires a long-term military presence in the Middle East because that's where the plans to attack us are emanating.

Secretary Clinton and I have worked well together, but the Arab Spring is a different question... This administration, collectively, made some very bad decisions, and they now have to climb out of a deep hole.

Foreign policy matters cannot be intelligently decided in a large general meeting.

The ability of the Congress of the United States to have any strategic view [of foreign policy] is virtually nil.

No American President should ever take any option off the table.

War should never be thought of as something autonomous, but always as an instrument of policy.