Max Boot Quotes
We should never say that we recognize the right of these mullahs to oppress their own people.
He was discussing the problem of negotiating with the Iranian government which was an unelected, dictatorial theocracy.
Max Boot, Historian & National Security Expert, Interview, PBS The Charlie Rose Show, September 19, 2006
Sourced by: Eigen's Political and Historical Quotations
What is particularly interesting about this passage is that a Middle Eastern contemporary historian and commentator compared circumstances to political events with the Umayyads and the Abbisids to those in Persia and Rome. Chosroes (Khosrow) was a Persian King who had his brothers murdered, and Caesar was viewed as a tyrant. Even then, the history of politics, in one country influenced events and attitudes in others,
The mullahs had a great deal of power in Iraq and were among the most vocal opponents of democracy and freedom and instead argued for a Theocracy under Islamic law—Sharia which allowed almost no freedoms for the individual.
The Taliban opposed all education except orthodox Muslim religious education.
Mark Twain referring to and reflecting on his encounter with the Sultan of Turkey, Abdul Aziz.
His views are a mix of modernism and fundamentalism. He favors democracy and elections but also favored the Taliban destroying the great ancient Buddha statues when he was called an idol worshipper for urging the preservation of art.
Max A. Boot is a Russian-American author, consultant, editorialist, lecturer, and military historian. He worked as a writer and editor for Christian Science Monitor and then for The Wall Street Journal in the 1990s. He is now Jeane J. Kirkpatrick Senior Fellow in National Security Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations and a contributor to The Washington Post. He has written for numerous publications such as The Weekly Standard, the Los Angeles Times, and The New York Times, and he has also authored books of military history. In 2018, Boot published The Road Not Taken, a biography of Edward Lansdale, and The Corrosion of Conservatism: Why I Left the Right, which details Boot's "ideological journey from a 'movement' conservative to a man without a party" in the aftermath of the 2016 presidential election.
