Bob Ainsworth Quotes

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.

Libya is a failed state and becoming a launching pad for external operations, as is Sinai in Egypt.

To some extent, Rwanda became a victim of the Somalia experience.

Surely our inaction with respect to Syria is a poor precedent if we're fighting a war on terror.

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.

I am here because I think it was a terrible sin of the west to allow those years of war.

Amin is the shame of the whole world. The fact that he managed to rule so long and commit so many crimes was only possible thanks to the hypocrisy of the East and the West who were waging the Cold War for world domination.

Once a conflict has dragged on for a decade, most people are tired of war - and the troubles that flow from it.

I think a weakened, fragmented, chaotic Iraq, which could happen if this isn’t done carefully, is more dangerous in the long run than a contained Saddam is now.

Civil wars tend to spread to neighboring countries. That’s what history shows.

You are going to regret the end of the cold war because violence is going to leak out free from the control of states.

Bashar Assad's power over the areas of Syria under government control is slipping. Armed militias are growing stronger and the country's dictator can do nothing to stop them. Now, these fighters are taking over control in many areas, committing murder, looting and harassing civilians. And nobody can stop them, not even Assad himself. Indeed, the militias are now more powerful than even the country's dictator and have become the real holders of power in Syria.

The high probability is if American forces withdraw from Afghanistan and if no alternative international arrangement is made that then the historic contests between the regions and the sects will reappear, the Taliban will re-emerge, and a very complicated and maybe chaotic situation will develop.

There is nothing worth having that can be obtained by nuclear war - nothing material or ideological - no tradition that it can defend. It is utterly self-defeating.

The north of the Central African Republic is now a war zone, with rival armed bands burning villages, kidnapping children, robbing travelers and killing people with impunity.

Since World War II, most of the conflicts in the world have been internal conflicts. The weapon of choice in those wars has all too often been landmines - to such a degree that what we find today are tens of millions of landmines contaminating approximately 70 countries around the world.

Landmines are different from other conventional weapons. When a war is over, the landmines stay in the ground and continue to kill - for decades.

The United States has been unable to create a post-Cold War security architecture in which Russia feels it has a stake.

The security agencies are prosecuting the government’s war in Darfur.

History will show that perhaps we did not think through the aftermath of the fall of Baghdad. But here we are.

… the first armed aggression which the world has seen since the end of the war.

A stable world may be one in which the United States can act to secure peace without fear of a nuclear attack.

When civil war is regularly established in a country, and when the nation is divided into conflicting armies and opposing camps, the two parties in such war may be dealt with by other powers as if they were separate communities, and that such other powers may take part with one side or the other, according to their sympathies and interests, just as they might in a war between separate and independent nations.

A U.S. invasion of Iraq could turn the whole region into a cauldron, and thus destroy the war on terrorism. A military campaign very likely would have to be followed by a large-scale, long-term military occupation.

I believe that it must be the policy of the United States to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures. I believe that we must assist free peoples to work out their own destinies in their own way.