Mahmoud Ahmadinejad Quotes

The American administration is trying to achieve any gain in the shadow of the embarrassment hitting it because of its failures in Iraq, Afghanistan and Palestine after the failure of Israel's war on Lebanon and the retreat of America's project in the region.

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.

If you look in the Muslim World right now, the Shia, the Sunni Muslims are standing at the brink of a pit of fire started by Western intervention and influence in pitting them against each other by exploiting their divisions. So the stage is set for war in that area of the world that would destroy that area as completely as what they are calling the failed state Libya making Syria, Afghanistan and Iraq failed states.

Iraq may have been a preview of that, but it's still redeemable if we get out fast. In a war with Iran, we'll get dragged down for 20 or 30 years. The world will condemn us. We will lose our position in the world.

By God, we will make the fire eat up half of Isreal if it tries to do anything against Iraq.

I for one do not negotiate with Hamas and believe it is a mistake to do so.

I believe that Israel is very likely not to survive, it's not going to last forever, and now there's nothing that someone like me can do about it, in that it's a threat of nuclear or biological or chemical attack.

We've just let too many things happen. And now, try to turn around and fix it. Getting involved in a [Syria] civil war directly was never something I thought made sense.

I think Israel, as a number of commentators pointed out, is becoming an insane state. And we have to be honest about that. While the rest of the world wants peace, Europe wants peace, the US wants peace, but this state wants war, war and war.

Tony Blair is a very able politician; he's perhaps one of the best of his generation. He made a major contribution in many areas, but in Iraq I believe he got it wrong. He got it wrong.

Rather than starting a new inferno in Iraq, our energies would have been better spent in extinguishing the existing fire in Palestine.

The Iraq War has thrown such a heavy shadow on Afghanistan that you can't hardly get any news about that now. I went to Afghanistan this year and spent more time there than I did in Iraq ... just 'cause they were forgotten about, and I wanted them to know that I appreciated it.

I think we've, again, got to be extremely careful; otherwise we'll misunderstand what's going on in Iraq and in Syria today. Of course, you can't say that those of us who removed Saddam in 2003 bear no responsibility for the situation in 2015.

Iraq is sort of a situation where you've got a guy who drove the bus into the ditch. You obviously have to get the bus out of the ditch, and that's not easy to do, although you probably should fire the driver.

[Iranians] are destabilizing governments in the region. They continue to support Hezbollah and Hamas in Lebanon against Israel. A lot of work that we have do is going to be incredibly hard. I'm prepared to do that work, but I believe, just as I did with imposing the sanctions, you have to get action for action.

The war in Iraq is a serious situation. It's - it involves the worst foreign policy mistake in the history of this country. So we should take everything serious. This is - we find ourselves in a very deep hole. We need to find a way to dig out of it.

War on Iraq runs the risk of turning the Middle East into an inexhaustible recruiting ground for anti- western terrorism.

I don't think that the United States has the bulk of the responsibility. I really put that on Bashar Assad and on the Iraqis and on the region itself.

Take the Iraq War,it's the second worst crime after the Second World War. It's the first time in history, in the history of imperialism, there were huge demonstrations, before the war was officially launched.

Before the Iraq war I was quite disturbed by some of the neoconservatives, who were saying things like, "What is the point of being a superpower if you can't do such-and-such, take on these responsibilities?" The point of being a superpower is that people will leave you alone.

And I think the almost undeviating support by Great Britain for the ill-advised policies of President Bush in Iraq have been a major tragedy for the world.

If Israel falls to the terrorists, the entire free world will tremble. To forsake Israel now would be tantamount to forsaking Great Britain in 1940. It is unthinkable, and it is unthinkable because the world wants to know if we believe freedom is worth fighting for.

I believe that the politics of intervention and the Kosovo war prompted a fresh resumption of the arms race worldwide.

On the McLaughlin Report, August 26, 1990: 'There are only two groups that are beating the drums for war in the middle East, the Israeli Defense Ministry and its amen corner in the United States.

We did not think that [Egyptian President] Nasser wanted war. The two divisions he sent to Sinai on May 14 would not have been sufficient to launch an offensive against Israel. He knew it and we knew it.