Top 100 Richard Engel Quotes
#1. Every country where the the United States maintains troops has a status of forces agreement.
Richard Engel
#3. The Donetsk People's Republic is the self-declared pro-Russian government that wants to break away from Ukraine.
Richard Engel
#4. 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
#5. It's probably time to end the global war on terrorism.
Richard Engel
#6. 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
#7. 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
#8. Afghanistan was always a backwater in the Islamic world.
Richard Engel
#9. If Israel sees weapons moving toward its border, it acts.
Richard Engel
#10. We should have a time to reflect on the accomplishments of the military, of their sacrifices, of their failures.
Richard Engel
#12. I had some training on how to cope with hostage-taking.
Richard Engel
#13. Women, who enjoyed a high social status and levels of education under Saddam, saw terrible setbacks as Iraq fell into civil war. As a result of the sectarian violence from 2005-2007, women retreated to their homes and fell from public view.
Richard Engel
#14. Syrians need to prepare for the aftermath if the Assad regime falls. Atrocities that could be considered war crimes have been committed in this country, and Syrians should rightly demand that the perpetrators be held accountable.
Richard Engel
#15. Putin believes Russia is back, and he may be right.
Richard Engel
#16. Many in the U.S. military believe ISIS needs to be immediately, and repeatedly, smashed by American drones and warplanes.
Richard Engel
#17. Foreigners who speak Arabic in the Middle East are often assumed to be working for the C.I.A. or Israel's intelligence agency, the Mossad.
Richard Engel
#18. There are many Israelis who are not keen on Barack Obama - they did not want to see him elected.
Richard Engel
#19. 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
#20. The truth was, there was never a connection between Iraq and Osama Bin Laden. There were no weapons of mass destruction, either.
Richard Engel
#21. 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
#22. 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
#23. 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
#24. 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
#25. The Israeli military believes it has destroyed all of Hamas's tunnels, or at least all the ones it knew about.
Richard Engel
#26. 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
#27. I don't look for good-news stories or bad-news stories.
Richard Engel
#28. 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
#29. We're all bloggers and punks and rebels with cameras. There is absolutely no respect for career journalists anymore.
Richard Engel
#30. The Arab Spring is over. The days of the protesters with laptops and BlackBerrys in Tahrir Square are long gone.
Richard Engel
#31. 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
#32. The U.S. invaded the wrong country, destroying an odious government that was not responsible for 9/11. I don't know how you recover from invading the wrong country, no matter how you spin it.
Richard Engel
#33. It seems nothing good comes out of Abu Ghraib.
Richard Engel
#35. 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
#36. 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
#37. Once you start bombing in Syria, when you start looking for targets, there will be a lot.
Richard Engel
#38. 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
#39. The U.S., often in secret, carries out counterterrorism missions all the time, with drones in places like Yemen and Somalia.
Richard Engel
#40. 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
#41. Unfortunately, the American policy towards Pakistan is just to worry and express concern, and that is not a clear policy at all.
Richard Engel
#42. 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
#43. 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
#44. 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
#45. Each day had the same bloody rhythm: mortars at dawn, car bombs by 11: 00 a.m., drive-by shootings before tea, and mortars again at dusk. At night the death squads went to work.
Richard Engel
#46. Mali exists mostly to itself. Few people go there. Few Malians leave. Most of Mali's 13 million people live, and seem to live quite happily, off the rice, corn and millet they grow and the long-horn cattle and goats they keep.
Richard Engel
#47. Rockets fired by the Taliban generally aren't guided.
Richard Engel
#48. 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
#50. 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
#51. Any information about U.S. special operations forces is highly sensitive.
Richard Engel
#52. 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
#53. 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
#54. 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
#55. Foreign aid projects have pumped billions of dollars into the Afghan economy.
Richard Engel
#56. Everyone knows what can happen to soldiers who are in front line units.
Richard Engel
#57. Afghanistan and Iraq were lumped together in what was called a 'global war on terrorism.'
Richard Engel
#58. 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
#59. 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
#60. For many foreign fighters, the jihad in Iraq and Syria is a commuter war.
Richard Engel
#61. After literally hundreds of firefights, Chosen Company became increasingly battle-hardened. And they also became increasingly suspicious of their Afghan counterparts, believing - with their lives on the line at the end of the day - that they could only truly rely on themselves.
Richard Engel
#62. The Iraqi government will try and retake some of the cities have that been captured by ISIS. That means the Shiite government dropping bombs on civilian areas, on Sunni cities. There will likely be a response with car bombings here in Baghdad, and this could be a long fight.
Richard Engel
#63. I have seen heroics - soldiers saving other soldiers' lives - and horrors.
Richard Engel
#64. Israel is shutting out the Arab world and shutting itself in.
Richard Engel
#66. Kidnapping is always a threat in this life of reporting on men hurting one another because of religion and politics.
Richard Engel
#67. Egypt has a devout population. People go out, they pray, they fast.
Richard Engel
#68. There weren't many weapons in Egypt in the 1990s. Police controls on guns were very strict back then. That is no longer the case in Egypt today.
Richard Engel
#69. 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
#70. 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
#71. Israel specifically does not want Syria to hand over weapons, chemical or conventional, to Hezbollah.
Richard Engel
#72. 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
#73. Hamas is a Palestinian political party with an aggressive militant wing.
Richard Engel
#74. Assad's regime helped ISIS grow by attacking other opposition forces and rarely targeting ISIS.
Richard Engel
#75. Israel sees the world just beyond its borders collapsing.
Richard Engel
#76. 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
#77. Not surprisingly, in most Sunni regions there has little appetite for free U.S.-sponsored elections.
Richard Engel
#78. I now saw war as a constant, akin to wildfires. They break out unless you work actively to prevent them.
Richard Engel
#79. There are clearly many Egyptian free-thinkers and intellectuals - lots of wonderful Egyptian artists and architects and scientists.
Richard Engel
#80. 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
#81. Many senior government officials, CIA, FBI, counter terrorism officials - when they look back at the decade, they effectively conclude that the United States overreacted after 9/11.
Richard Engel
#82. If democracy brings an undemocratic group to power, is that a victory for democracy?
Richard Engel
#83. 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
#84. 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
#85. 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
#86. Everything changed with the First World War. The Middle East was reorganized, redefined, and the seeds were planted for a century of bloodshed.
Richard Engel
#87. Staying in a very public fight with the U.S. is exactly what Al Qaeda wants.
Richard Engel
#88. Each time there is a conflict between Israel and Gaza, accusations fly over who started it, each side blaming the other.
Richard Engel
#89. President George W. Bush, in his now-rare public appearances and interviews, still refuses to acknowledge he did anything to help Iran. But it doesn't really matter what he thinks.
Richard Engel
#90. Faced with the crippling sanctions, Iran could simply decide it is paying too high a cost to pursue its nuclear program and could opt for negotiations and reconciliation with the United States and other members of the international community. This is clearly the preferred option of American leaders.
Richard Engel
#91. 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
#92. A lot of Iran's empowerment is a result of the war in Iraq.
Richard Engel
#93. 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
#94. 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
#95. Every child is taught if you try to please everyone, you end up upsetting everyone.
Richard Engel
#96. The Taliban may pine for a pre-industrial society, but most Afghans do not.
Richard Engel
#97. Israel is becoming a fortress. Fences along the borders with Egypt, Lebanon, and Syria.
Richard Engel
#98. 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
#99. '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
#100. ISIS is in many ways a creation of the Syrian regime.
Richard Engel
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