Arundhati Roy Quotes

Seeing Syria remove Assad is a very high priority for America.

The big issue is whether the United States will succeed in its venture of reshaping the Middle East. It is not clear to me that using military force is the way to do it. We should not have gone into Iraq. But we have.

Saudi Arabia cannot go pedal-to-the-metal on the way toward Sharia, although some might say they’re there, because they have a relationship with the United States that must continue. And they can’t make that relationship difficult for the US, so they moderate, and therefore they proceed...

No one wants to abandon the Israelis. But I think the perception is, and I think it's probably an accurate perception, that the tail is leading the dog - that we are giving the Israelis carte blanche ability to exercise whatever they want to do in their area.

We would like to have friendly regimes with enough broad participation of their populations to maintain long-term stability, so that we would have not only access to the region's wealth, but we would be able to ensure the security of our good friend Israel.

It is no exaggeration to say that Syria holds the key for nearly all of America's foreign policy goals in the Middle East. As Syria goes, so goes the region.

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?

The United State can no longer allow its Arab allies to ward off democratic reform.

The fighting in Iraq has clearly demonstrated the strength of the bond between America and the Shiite heretics

Doesn't it seem awfully strange that the Iraqi government we support is an ally of the Iranians who are our declared enemies? Are we not now supporting the Iranians by propping up their allies in Iraq?

Israel believes, when it comes right down to it America is the only big country that cares whether they live or die. That's why I can say, give up the West Bank, because the Israelis knew that if the Iraqi or the Iranian army came across the Jordan river, I would personally grab a rifle, get in a ditch, and fight and die, and I would.

There is nothing in common between the United States and Saudi Arabia except Israel.

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

What the United States needs to do at this point is reaffirm our commitment that Assad must go and that Iran and Russia cannot be granted a sphere of influence in Syria, and that we will not sit down at the negotiating table to help broker Assad's victory in this fight.

America went into Iraq. We shouldn't have gone into Iraq. We shouldn't have gotten out the way we got out. The world is a total mess.

I believe he [Saddam Hussein] wants a better relationship with America.

America was the funder of petro-dictatorships. We treated all these countries as basically big, large gas stations: Libya station, Iraq station, Iran station, Egypt station, Syria station, and all we asked of them were three things: Keep your palms open, your prices low and don't bother Israel too much, and you can do whatever you want to your own people.

Early withdrawal from Iraq would result in unarguably, defeat and humiliation for the United States. There's no question. We would be defeated by definition. We would be humiliated in that defeat.

The United States doesn't have the will to work against al-Nusra or even ISIS, because they believe that this is a card they can use for their own agenda. If they attack al-Nusra or ISIS, they will lose a very important card regarding the situation in Syria.

Once in 1979, [Zbigniew] Brzezinski gave an important slogan: "Bye-bye PLO." After two months, I was in Tehran saying to him: "Bye-bye Brzezinski." Who can imagine that America will lose one of its strongest bases?

We are thus in the position of having to borrow from Europe to defend Europe, of having to borrow from China and Japan to defend Chinese and Japanese access to Gulf oil, and of having to borrow from Arab emirs, sultans and monarchs to make Iraq safe for democracy. We borrow from the nations we defend so that we may continue to defend them. To question this is an unpardonable heresy called 'isolationism.'

What you have in Iraq is not just a society coming apart like Yugoslavia or Congo. What is at stake is not just Iraq's stability but the balance of power in the region.

I don't think you can solve what's going on in Iraq unless you can deal effectively with the region and you can't deal effectively with the region if you start with the premise that you can't talk to people who disagree with you.

The Saudis are so happy. People don't understand, the Saudi Arabian government - kingdom - hates Iran. They're scared to death of Iran. That's Shi'a versus Sunni Muslim, and the Iranians are Persians. They're not Arabs. So it's a double whammy. There is no love lost, and the Saudis have been petrified over Barack Obama's peace dance and nuclear dealings with the nation of Iran. They are ecstatic to have Donald Trump.

The biggest problems with Iran in the region are not due to the size of their resources, but due to the fact that they've been more effective in supporting proxies and stirring up dissension and conflict in the region than America or our allies have been in stopping those activities.