Top 154 Quotes & Sayings by Stephen Kinzer - Page 3

Chechens are not ethnically or culturally Russian, and have now been fighting for generations to free themselves from Russian rule.

Guerrilla leaders win wars by being paranoid and ruthless. Once they take power, they are expected to abandon those qualities and embrace opposite ones: tolerance, compromise and humility. Almost none manages to do so.

Want to depose the government of a poor country with resources? Want to bash Muslims? Want to build support for American military interventions around the world? Want to undermine governments that are raising their people up from poverty because they don't conform to the tastes of Upper West Side intellectuals? Use human rights as your excuse!

Romney is a classic case of re-invention. As governor of Massachusetts, he supported government-sponsored healthcare, was sympathetic to gay rights, and opposed harsh restrictions on abortion. After measuring the difference between the Massachusetts electorate and the national one to which he must now appeal, he has reversed those positions.

Successive American presidents have turned a blind eye to piles of evidence that Saudi money is being used to foment holy war against America.

For many years as a foreign correspondent, I not only worked alongside human rights advocates, but considered myself one of them. To defend the rights of those who have none was the reason I became a journalist in the first place. Now, I see the human rights movement as opposing human rights.

Foreign interventions always end badly.

Only one American has given his life for Iranian democracy. He was a young idealist from Nebraska named Howard Baskerville. In 1907, fresh out of Princeton, Baskerville went to Iran as a schoolteacher. He found himself in the midst of a revolution against tyranny, and was carried away with passion for the democratic cause.

Every nation, like every individual, would like to believe it owes 'no apology' to anyone. Adults realise, however, that few among us are purely innocent or utterly blameless.

It is truly vital for the United States to assure that it is not attacked with weapons of mass destruction; to prevent wars in other countries from spreading onto American soil; and to maintain access to global sea lanes on which our economy depends. Beyond that, there is little or nothing in the world that should draw the United States to war.

Adroit geo-strategists take new realities into account as they try to imagine how global politics will unfold. In the foreign policy business, however, inertia is a powerful force and 'adroit' a little-known concept.

Rebels in Darfur have learned the value of mobilizing western human rights groups to prolong wars, and this lesson is working gloriously for them.

Weapons systems the U.S. sold to the Shah of Iran wound up in the hands of Islamic militants who seized power there in 1979; a comparable scenario in Saudi Arabia is hardly impossible.

Revolutionaries who come to power by force of arms usually have great crimes in their background. Leaders who survive campaigns by great powers to destroy them do not survive because they observe the niceties of law. Subversives who shape world events by covert action and violence work in shadows and detest the light of day.

Challenging orthodoxy is a death sentence in Washington.

Saudi Arabia supplies much oil to the U.S. And it is the world's largest consumer of American weaponry.

Chechens are Muslim, and some share the belief that the West is engaged in a global campaign against Islam.

The dramatic rise of Turkey in the councils of world power was one of the main geopolitical developments of 2010.

Was Castro sincere when, during his guerrilla war, he swore that he was not a Communist? If so, when did he change, and why? Looking back, does he believe he might have chosen a better course?

Castro has lived almost his entire life as a clandestine revolutionary. To such figures, truth is always malleable, always subservient to political goals.

Few living figures could contribute as much as Castro to our understanding of the second half of the 20th century.

The key to Turkey's success has been its ability to reinvent itself as times change.

Human Rights Watch wants Rwandans to be able to speak freely about their ethnic hatreds, and to allow political parties connected with the defeated genocide army to campaign freely for power.

Other places are also generators of far-flung violence beyond their own borders - Pakistan and Saudi Arabia are obvious examples - but none has as long a history of war, resistance, and terror as Chechnya.

In his tub-thumping speech at the 2008 Republican National Convention, Romney sounded like the hedge-fund tycoon he is.

If women are being oppressed in Egypt or children are being forced to join armies in the Congo, for example, it is not only acceptable but wonderful for Americans to be concerned, outraged, and active.

One of the immutable patterns of history is the rise and fall of great powers. Those that survive are the ones that adapt as the world changes.

Turkey and Brazil, though half a world apart geographically, have much in common. Both are large countries that spent long years under military dominance, but have broken with that history and made decisive steps towards full democracy.

For decades, Turkey was widely viewed as a reliable NATO ally: prickly at times, but safely in America's corner.

American press, like the press in many countries, acts like a cheerleader to our government rather than a critical observer. This is especially true, when it comes to foreign interventions. That means that when government leaders conclude that intervention in a foreign country is justified, the press rarely criticizes it. In fact, the press has been an enthusiastic cheerleader for many of our foreign interventions.

Throughout the twentieth century and into the beginning of the twenty-first, the United States repeatedly used its military power, and that of its clandestine services, to overthrow governments that refused to protect American interests. Each time, it cloaked its intervention in the rhetoric of national security and liberation. In most cases, however, it acted mainly for economic reasons-specifically to establish, promote and defend the right of Americans to do business around the world without interference.

I don't have any problem with the United States acting on behalf of its own interests. That's what big powers do; that's what all countries do. I would just like to see us analyze in a serious way what really is in our interest. Sometimes we intervene in foreign countries in ways that seem successful at first. In the end, however, we wind up with unpredicted consequences that make us regret those operations.

It is not far-fetched to draw a line from Operation Ajax through the Shah's repressive regime and the Islamic Revolution to the fireballs that engulfed the World Trade Center in New York.

The world has paid a heavy price for the lack of democracy in most of the Middle East. Operation Ajax [CIA code for the August 1953 coup] taught tyrants and aspiring tyrants there that the world's most powerful governments were willing to tolerate limitless oppression as long as oppressive regimes were friendly to the West and to Western oil companies. That helped tilt the political balance in a vast region away from freedom and toward dictatorship.