Zitat des Tages von Richard Engel:
Many in the U.S. military believe ISIS needs to be immediately, and repeatedly, smashed by American drones and warplanes.
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.'
The Taliban may pine for a pre-industrial society, but most Afghans do not.
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.
9/11 was a terrible, horrific, tragic day.
War can be fun for certain people. It's a magnet for sadists, losers, and angry dreamers.
Foreign aid projects have pumped billions of dollars into the Afghan economy.
Not surprisingly, in most Sunni regions there has little appetite for free U.S.-sponsored elections.
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.
It seems nothing good comes out of Abu Ghraib.
Putin believes Russia is back, and he may be right.
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.
The Arab Spring is over. The days of the protesters with laptops and BlackBerrys in Tahrir Square are long gone.
War does horrible things to human beings, to societies. It brings out the best, but most often the worst, in our human nature.
I don't look for good-news stories or bad-news stories.
Everyone knows what can happen to soldiers who are in front line units.
Under a decades-old agreement, Palestinian refugee camps are supposed to administer and police themselves. Lebanese troops are technically not allowed to enter them.
We're all bloggers and punks and rebels with cameras. There is absolutely no respect for career journalists anymore.
Every war has revolutionary justice.
For many foreign fighters, the jihad in Iraq and Syria is a commuter war.
To be slapped with a shoe is a dirty insult in the Muslim world.
Kidnapping is always a threat in this life of reporting on men hurting one another because of religion and politics.
In the 1990s, Islamists in Algeria won elections like the Brotherhood did in Egypt. The Algerian military refused to allow the Islamists to take power. A war erupted, killing between 100,000 to 200,000 people, depending on which estimates are to be believed.
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.
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.
Lebanon does not have a powerful army.
I think it's really important to start thinking about infrastructure as essential national security.
If democracy brings an undemocratic group to power, is that a victory for democracy?
The U.S., often in secret, carries out counterterrorism missions all the time, with drones in places like Yemen and Somalia.
Once you start bombing in Syria, when you start looking for targets, there will be a lot.
The Taliban mostly attacks international and Afghan security forces. They rarely carry out attacks in markets.
The Donetsk People's Republic is the self-declared pro-Russian government that wants to break away from Ukraine.
Egypt has a devout population. People go out, they pray, they fast.
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.
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.
Every child is taught if you try to please everyone, you end up upsetting everyone.