April Glaspie Quotes

In general, states do not count on pledges of 'no more war' from their neighbors. Israel's army never counted on it from Egypt, for example.

There is no reason that Iraq should be at war with Israel.

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

After spending the 1980s building up Saddam's Iraq as a counterweight to Iran, U.S. policy abruptly reversed course with his invasion of Kuwait and has since tried to cut him down to size. The policy is called 'containment,' but the question is, containment of what?

I think we should take Iraq and Iran and combine them into one country and call it Irate. All the pissed off people live in one place and get it over with.

When it comes to the Middle East, this is always a very difficult issue for any American president.

An Arab country does not have the right to occupy another Arab country. God forbid, if Iraq should deviate from the right path, we would want the Arabs to send their armies to put things right. If Iraq should become intoxicated by its power and move to overwhelm another Arab state, the Arabs would be right to deploy their armies to check it.

Nobody ever lost any money betting against Arab-Israeli peace

Saudi Arabia needs friends. We are in a war in Yemen, in a confrontation with Iran, so we need friends like Canada, Europe.

I don't want a political party in my government that interferes in Arab countries against other Arab countries.

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.

There's a good lesson for policymakers: It's not the presence of the U.S. that is a problem for many people in the Arab region; it's the type of presence we bring.

When George Bush Senior [George HW Bush] was getting his alliance together to go into Iraq - to kick the Iraqis out of Kuwait - he rang me up. I was very close to George Bush Senior; I got to know him well as Vice President to Ronald Reagan. And George rang me up and said, "Oh, Bob," he said, "I'm having trouble with Brian [Mulroney]." He said, "He's got a big wheat trade with Iraq, and he doesn't want to upset that." I said, "You leave it with me."

I'm perfectly willing to say no more Iraqs, which means no more unilateral starting of the war on false claims, false information, and a complete misunderstanding of the nature of the situation in the region.

The only foreign policy advice I heard from China was when they said to Sudan, 'Don't go back to war.' That's all they said. They didn't push anything else.

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.

A constructive approach to diplomacy doesn't mean relinquishing one's rights. It means engaging with one's counterparts, on the basis of equal footing and mutual respect, to address shared concerns and achieve shared objectives.

The United States is a strong and ardent ally of Israel. The fact of the matter is that friends can disagree. I think what's important is that world leaders are able to sit down with one another, have frank conversations and move forward.

My conviction is that the best strategy to defend the West is to defend Israel.

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.

We will not send troops. Germany is not committed to Iraq - we will not commit ourselves with troops.

Israel ranks her priorities in the following way: security, land, and water.

For decades, the violence in the Middle East has claimed a multitude of innocent civilian victims: Men, women and children, Arab and Israeli.

And we ought to work our diplomacy first and I think it's a reason it's going to respond increasingly to our diplomacy particularly with the president's direct involvement in the peace process, and I think that's extraordinarily important.

Iraq will not allow any action on its soil that could harm the U.S. We don't want any action from our soil to target our neighbors.