Richard Myers Quotes

ISIS controls a territory roughly the size of Maryland where 8 million people live. If it's attacked and toppled, who will fill the void?

I would not be surprised to see Syria break apart entirely.

I think we are realising that governments can't govern us any more.

That was not part of the U.N. resolution; it was not part of the mandate to go on to Baghdad and, frankly, if we had gone into Baghdad and pushed Saddam Hussein off, we would have inherited an even bigger mess than the mess we inherited with the refugee problem.

Therefore, once U.S. forces leave, it is almost inevitable that an anti-Western, anti-U.S. regime will arise.

President Karzai does not have any idea of what is going on in his country.

The Bush Administration went into the Middle East thinking it was spreading democracy. Instead they spread sectarianism.

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

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.

If anything caused ISIS, it was the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq.

When Saddam Hussein was eliminated, the Iraqi statehood and thousands of people from the former Baath party were also eliminated. Thousands of Iraqi servicemen, who were part of the state's Sunni elite, found themselves thrown out into the street. No one gave a thought about them, and today they end up in the ISIS army.

Not only did you have people fleeing Libya, people fleeing Syria, the destabilisation of other African countries as a result of arms flows, but the Libyan state itself err was no longer able to control the movement of people through it.

I mean, you can agree or disagree with Iraq or Afghanistan, but by the way, now the great campaigning cause out there is the absence of intervention in Syria. And then in Libya, it's partial intervention. And that doesn't really explain why some countries that have literally nothing to do with the interventions in the Middle East end up getting targeted.

I think the changes that have happened, there have been come positive, but by and large, you have to say the changes have been negative. The situation has reached a fairly critical stage in Afghanistan.

Egypt is the next domino to fall and, as they say, so goes Egypt so goes the Middle East.

The Middle East has gone through periods of turmoil before. In the 1950s and 1960s, there were revolutions. When monarchies were collapsing in a number of countries, we had radicals and we had Nasserism. Today it's a little bit more complicated.

I think what history will show is that one of the most tragic results of the war in Iraq will be that although Sharon, the Likudites, the Neoconservatives in our country, President Bush and the Democratic party thought the war in Iraq and destroying Saddam would benefit Israeli security, we're seeing absolutely that the war in Iraq has probably put Israeli security in a more tenuous condition than it's been in since the founding of the Israeli state.

The situation in Congo shows nothing for which you could hold Rwanda responsible.

You'd have civil war. You'd have a race war in this country.

I think in theory, the United States finds it much easier to deal with situations where there is a leading country. You can go to the leaders of that country and say, for example, to India, "There are all these problems in Bangladesh, we really have to do something about it, what do you suggest we can do to work out a common policy?" But when you don't have the equivalent of India, you have to go capital to capital trying to put together a coalition, which is extraordinarily difficult, especially in the Arab world, because of the historic rivalries and branches of Islam.

One outcome is almost certain. Extremism stands to benefit enormously from an uncalculated adventure in Iraq.

Iran is a great problem, but not necessarily a great country. In fact, I think it is a very weak country.

I think you have an enormous amount of fear and uncertainty in this country. And it's not just from San Bernardino or from Paris.

Kiev's attempts to exert economic pressure on Donbas (region of east Ukraine) and disrupt its daily life only aggravates the situation. This is a dead-end track, fraught with a big catastrophe.

A bombing was planned [in Syria], which would probably make the situation worse, but would at least establish US credibility.