Top 100 Richard Engel Quotes
#1. Israel sees the world just beyond its borders collapsing.
Richard Engel
#2. Assad's regime helped ISIS grow by attacking other opposition forces and rarely targeting ISIS.
Richard Engel
#3. When you look at - when you talk to people in Africa and across the Middle East, they're not satisfied with the way things are going. Sure, this idea of democracy was injected into the region, but it has brought mostly chaos.
Richard Engel
#4. Israel specifically does not want Syria to hand over weapons, chemical or conventional, to Hezbollah.
Richard Engel
#5. The U.S. spent years and years and billions of dollars to build the Iraqi army only to watch it collapse and hand over so many of its weapons.
Richard Engel
#6. The people of Gaza are trapped. Israel has sealed the border, and they have no way to leave the Gaza Strip to do business.
Richard Engel
#7. Egypt has a devout population. People go out, they pray, they fast.
Richard Engel
#9. Any information about U.S. special operations forces is highly sensitive.
Richard Engel
#10. I have seen heroics - soldiers saving other soldiers' lives - and horrors.
Richard Engel
#11. For many foreign fighters, the jihad in Iraq and Syria is a commuter war.
Richard Engel
#12. The United States encouraged Iraqis to rise up after Saddam Hussein's army was driven out of Kuwait. Washington assumed Saddam was weak after losing the 1991 Gulf War. Iraqis rose up, but Saddam's troops killed thousands - Iraqis say tens of thousands - in a counter-offensive.
Richard Engel
#13. Egypt is the most populous Arab nation, the seat of Sunni Islamic doctrine, and has tremendous political, religious and social influence on the rest of the region. For better or worse, it will lead the rest of the Middle East by example. So goes Egypt, so goes the region.
Richard Engel
#14. Afghanistan and Iraq were lumped together in what was called a 'global war on terrorism.'
Richard Engel
#15. Everyone knows what can happen to soldiers who are in front line units.
Richard Engel
#16. The Muslim Brotherhood, or 'the Brotherhood' for short, is an Islamic group founded in Egypt in 1928. It has been pursuing a secret campaign to take over the government since its creation.
Richard Engel
#17. Afghanistan does have an air force: It has two C-130s. I saw one of them. It was nice, a gift from the United States. But two planes don't even make a Caribbean charter airline, let alone an air force for a country at war.
Richard Engel
#18. The U.S. spent billions of dollars to build a secular, professional national Iraqi army but failed because, despite all the U.S.-supplied guns, tanks and planes, the Iraqi military fell apart when challenged by a band of terrorists.
Richard Engel
#19. ISIS is in many ways a creation of the Syrian regime.
Richard Engel
#20. 'Shabiha' is a difficult word to translate into English. It comes from the word Syrians used to describe the luxury Mercedes favored by the Assad family's operatives that the enforcers of the regime used to move money, smuggle weapons and intimidate opponents.
Richard Engel
#21. Hezbollah and the government are only two of 18 political factions in Lebanon, most of them armed. There are militant Christian groups, Palestinian radicals, al-Qaida, Druze militias and even armed bands of Marxists still operating in Lebanon.
Richard Engel
#22. Every child is taught if you try to please everyone, you end up upsetting everyone.
Richard Engel
#23. The Muslim Prophet Mohammed was a big believer in charity and firmly established helping those in need as a basis of the religion.
Richard Engel
#24. For decades, Saddam and his Sunni minority had imposed their will on Iraq, carrying on a 14-century tradition of Sunnis controlling Mesopotamia despite a Shiite majority.
Richard Engel
#25. The Syrian border town of Qa'im was the main gateway Islamic radicals used to go to Iraq. Syria became the passageway for extremists from Egypt, Libya, Afghanistan, Yemen, Saudi Arabia and other Muslim nations to fight a jihad against American forces in Iraq.
Richard Engel
#26. Osama bin Laden organized an attack that was carried out against the United States, New York, Pentagon, and the other aircraft, with 19 attackers, 19 guys with box cutters. An attack that probably cost almost nothing.
Richard Engel
#27. Each time there is a conflict between Israel and Gaza, accusations fly over who started it, each side blaming the other.
Richard Engel
#28. Staying in a very public fight with the U.S. is exactly what Al Qaeda wants.
Richard Engel
#29. I kept seeing turning points. First the uprising. Then the creation of the Free Syrian Army, the FSA. Now a big assassination bombing in the heart of Assad's government. But the turn never came. It just got worse and worse.
Richard Engel
#30. An Egyptian newspaper once publicly identified me as the C.I.A. station chief in Cairo. It seemed so stupid at the time. I was only 24, a little young to be a station chief, and, of course, I was never with the C.I.A.
Richard Engel
#31. It is a disturbing aspect of human nature that if there is a place where there are no consequences and where the most grotesque murders are tolerated in the name of a cult claiming to be a faith, a certain type of person will be attracted to it.
Richard Engel
#32. If democracy brings an undemocratic group to power, is that a victory for democracy?
Richard Engel
#33. For eight years, you had the Bush administration with a very interventionist policy, driving into world affairs, driving primarily into the Islamic world, army first or fist first.
Richard Engel
#34. I now saw war as a constant, akin to wildfires. They break out unless you work actively to prevent them.
Richard Engel
#35. Not surprisingly, in most Sunni regions there has little appetite for free U.S.-sponsored elections.
Richard Engel
#36. We were meat to be bought and sold. Speaking Arabic made me a curious and unusual product. I didn't want to be special. I didn't want them to be curious about me.
Richard Engel
#37. Iraq was home of the Abbasid Caliphate, a golden age when the Muslim world was at the forefront of math, science and medicine.
Richard Engel
#38. Cairo was, and remains, an ugly, cement-colored, park-free city, dotted with a few bewildering, mind-expanding splendors that make the whole place manic and magical. There was always noise, dirt, and exhaust, the honking of horns and the screeching of brakes. My
Richard Engel
#39. War does horrible things to human beings, to societies. It brings out the best, but most often the worst, in our human nature.
Richard Engel
#40. You gotta love the names. They're so eager, earnest, and hopeful: Camp Prosperity, Camp Liberty, and Camp Victory are the names of just a few of the U.S. military bases in Baghdad.
Richard Engel
#41. Every country where the the United States maintains troops has a status of forces agreement.
Richard Engel
#42. I had some training on how to cope with hostage-taking.
Richard Engel
#44. We should have a time to reflect on the accomplishments of the military, of their sacrifices, of their failures.
Richard Engel
#45. If Israel sees weapons moving toward its border, it acts.
Richard Engel
#46. Afghanistan was always a backwater in the Islamic world.
Richard Engel
#47. Traditionally, all the kings of Saudi Arabia have been sons of the founder of Saudi Arabia, and they've gone from one son to the next.
Richard Engel
#48. When I take risks now, I do so only when I have to and with every precaution. I used to prospect for news, dropping into places to see what was up. Well, I could go to parts of Libya today and find lots of good stories, but I probably wouldn't be around to tell them.
Richard Engel
#49. It's probably time to end the global war on terrorism.
Richard Engel
#50. 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?
Richard Engel
#51. Obviously it was happenstance, but it did change my opinion of human nature. I now saw war as a constant, akin to wildfires. They break out unless you work actively to prevent them. It's an atavistic thing, buried deep in our DNA.
Richard Engel
#52. What is the Obama Doctrine? It seems to be one of disengagement, to try to ignore the hot, religious, dry, poor countries from Algeria to Pakistan.
Richard Engel
#53. Rockets fired by the Taliban generally aren't guided.
Richard Engel
#54. When you look at Syria, and you look at all the militant groups on the ground, there are many groups in Syria that could pose a threat to the United States, not just Khorasan.
Richard Engel
#55. A nuclear program has arguably worked as a deterrent for North Korea and other states - would Moammar Gadhafi have been deposed and summarily killed if Libya had had nuclear weapons? Iranians might not think so.
Richard Engel
#56. We know that al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula has some very dangerous, very important leaders who are tied directly to the top leadership of al Qaeda central, including a man who was formerly Osama bin Laden's secretary.
Richard Engel
#57. Unfortunately, the American policy towards Pakistan is just to worry and express concern, and that is not a clear policy at all.
Richard Engel
#58. There was an insurgency under President Hosni Mubarak in the 1990s. Egyptian police and soldiers fought weekly battles with Islamists in the sugarcane fields and thick reeds along the Nile in rural southern villages like Minya, Sohag, Enna and Assiout.
Richard Engel
#59. Under a decades-old agreement, Palestinian refugee camps are supposed to administer and police themselves. Lebanese troops are technically not allowed to enter them.
Richard Engel
#60. In 2015, when I went back to the States or to an international conference, I found that people didn't much care anymore. They saw the Middle East awash in blood, beyond redemption, and didn't want to read about it or see it on the evening news. They just wanted to keep away from it.
Richard Engel
#61. Once you start bombing in Syria, when you start looking for targets, there will be a lot.
Richard Engel
#62. I could scarcely believe that my new home was engulfed by war before I even had time to find an apartment. It seemed that war followed me everywhere I went.
Richard Engel
#63. Initially, before the modern state of Iraq was created, there were three separate provinces here: a Shiite in the south, a largely Sunni one in the middle, and a Kurdish one in the north.
Richard Engel
#65. In October 2008, American commandos launched a cross-border raid into Syria to capture an Islamic militant known as Abu Ghadiya. He was accused of being one of al Qaeda in Iraq's main smugglers of fighters and money between Iraq and Syria.
Richard Engel
#66. The Arab Spring is over. The days of the protesters with laptops and BlackBerrys in Tahrir Square are long gone.
Richard Engel
#67. We're all bloggers and punks and rebels with cameras. There is absolutely no respect for career journalists anymore.
Richard Engel
#68. The dangers of an Afghan collapse are many: Afghan deaths, a loss of American prestige, a loss of NATO prestige, a moral blow to U.S. troops and veterans, a Taliban resurgence, huge setbacks for women, and greater power for Pakistan and Pakistani extremists.
Richard Engel
#69. I don't look for good-news stories or bad-news stories.
Richard Engel
#71. Turkey wants to see Bashar al-Assad go and wants to kind of expand its sphere of influence into Turkey so its Ottoman glory or Ottoman past are once again project into the Syrian provinces. That's kind of what Turkey's vision is.
Richard Engel
#72. These days, I no longer believe there ever are truly good guys or bad guys in war, at least in the Middle East. They're generally shades of gray. But that doesn't translate well on television. It was too complicated. Too remote.
Richard Engel
#73. The Taliban mostly attacks international and Afghan security forces. They rarely carry out attacks in markets.
Richard Engel
#74. Damascus was the seat of the Ummayad Caliphate in the 7th and 8th centuries.
Richard Engel
#76. To be effective, demonstrators must pick the right square and make it the center of their activities.
Richard Engel
#77. The U.S. presence and American missteps made ethnic violence in Iraq far worse than it would have been otherwise after Saddam Saddam Hussein's fall.
Richard Engel
#78. The Muslim Brotherhood is much more hardline than Turkish Islamists.
Richard Engel
#80. Shaped like Texas, but twice as big, Mali is one of the poorest countries in the world. It exports almost nothing - mostly just cotton, gold and livestock - and doesn't have enough money to import much of anything, either.
Richard Engel
#81. Trouble seemed to follow me around. The late Tim Russert, my friend and the esteemed moderator of NBC's Meet the Press, once joked, "Richard, just don't come to Washington.
Richard Engel
#82. Based on the people l've spoken to, I think the impression is: Is America safer from Al Qaeda? Yes. Is America weaker as a nation because we have overspent and over-focused on Al Qaeda? Yes. I think that would be the conclusion that people seem to have come to and that I tend to agree with.
Richard Engel
#83. If you're in part of rebel-controlled Syria, and suddenly your house blows up or a building next to you blows up, it would be convenient for rebels to say, 'It was the Americans.'
Richard Engel
#84. I don't think you're going to be seeing the U.S. employing large army divisions to deal with small terrorist groups again. I don't think they're going to be occupying foreign nations in order to dry up terrorist groups within them. I think that lesson has been learned.
Richard Engel
#85. Persia is 7,000 years old and will fight to survive.
Richard Engel
#87. the United States decided it was not going to intervene in Syria - at least for the time being. The Syrian opposition felt betrayed and abandoned. Worse, Syrians were now completely without hope, which is the most dangerous human condition. A man or woman with no hope is capable of anything.
Richard Engel
#88. Anyone who follows the Middle East and Islamic world in general can't deny it is often a very violent place, that a band of instability now stretches from Algeria to Pakistan.
Richard Engel
#89. On one level, bombing ISIS is easy. The U.S. knows where the group operates. There's no need for a ten-year hunt like the one for Osama bin Laden. The terror group has two capital cities: Mosul in Iraq and Raqqa in Syria. Al-Qaeda never had such an obvious home address.
Richard Engel
#90. In 2009, Hamas was relatively new to power. It had won elections just three years earlier and was flexing its newfound strength via a war with its old enemy, Israel, which it officially wants destroyed.
Richard Engel
#91. If Syria collapses completely, the United States and the world would have to consider who, and what, fills the vacuum.
Richard Engel
#92. Hamas has long been Israel's enemy, but in the wake of the Arab Spring, the group is empowered like never before.
Richard Engel
#93. Bin Laden is dead, and most of his friends are dead. But did it need to cost a trillion dollars and two land wars, including one that didn't have to do with Al Qaeda? Probably not.
Richard Engel
#94. President Bashar Assad's regime is in the unique position of being targeted both by Israel and supporters of al Qaeda.
Richard Engel
#95. War is not a petri dish to examine and analyze our emotions.
Richard Engel
#96. When students and liberals initially occupied Tahrir Square, it looked like it might be a passing thing.
Richard Engel
#97. I think it's really important to start thinking about infrastructure as essential national security.
Richard Engel
#98. Many governments are quick to condemn Assad, but a dwindling number of them would celebrate a rebel victory in Damascus.
Richard Engel
#99. Egypt has a presidential system. The president runs the state. Who the president is matters profoundly.
Richard Engel
#100. Some Iraqi troops aren't willing to fight for their government. But many Shiites appear willing to fight for their religious leaders.
Richard Engel
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