The ultimate goal is to change Syria's behaviour on a variety of issues - on its interference in Lebanese internal affairs, on its support for Palestinian terrorist groups that oppose the Palestinian Authority, on, most importantly, acting as a land bridge between Iran and Hezbollah, where Hezbollah gets all its arms.
— Elliott Abrams
I just don't understand how Kerry or Obama or anybody else thought Assad was going to change.
China has concluded that trade trumps all.
For the entire first term, Obama and his people blamed Bush for everything - which is another way of saying they felt Bush and the Bush years were the inescapable reference point for everything they were themselves doing.
It was simply impossible to support Carter for reelection in 1980 and easy for me to support Reagan. The Reagan campaign was happy to have Democratic support, and the Reagan administration was happy to have Democrats in it; they took the view that, after all, Reagan himself had been a Democrat, so it was not a strike against you.
It seems clear to me that the Obama Administration has no human rights policy. That is, while in some inchoate sense they would like respect for human rights to grow around the world, as all Americans would, they have no actual policy to achieve that goal - and they subordinate it to all their other policy goals.
In 2004, President Bush gave Prime Minister Sharon certain guarantees about American policy, but the Obama administration treated those as a kind of private letter having no binding policy impact.
You are not practicing Judaism if you celebrate Christmas.
The real crime of Hosni Mubarak is that he ruled for 30 years and left behind an Egypt where the Muslim Brotherhood is the single strongest player.
The Sandinistas are a tough bunch of guys, with a fabulous amount of Soviet Bloc equipment and Soviet Bloc advisers.
When you work in the White House you talk to the White House staff all day, so you're talking to the guy who handles the congressional liaison and the guy who's handling domestic politics and the guy who's handling the American economy and so forth.
Two presidents pursued human rights policies that were serious and effective: Reagan and George W. Bush. They understood that American support for human rights activists is a moral imperative for us and also makes the world safer for us.
Now in its third year in office, the Obama Administration has never championed the cause of human rights. Its slow reaction in June 2009 to the stealing of the election in Iran and the birth of the 'Green Movement' there, and its delay in backing the rebellions in Egypt, Libya, and Syria, are evidence of this problem.
I never said I had no idea about most of the things you said I said I had no idea about.
If you are trying to raise a child to be a Jew, then you have to create a sense of Jewish identity. You really weaken that sense of identity if you celebrate two religions.
There's been an Israeli position, which is 'We love Mubarak,' that permeates their whole society, the political class. That certainly differs from many of us in the pro-Israel camp in the United States.
Obama is like the kid brother whose only standard for judging his own achievements is the records his big brother set.
I grew up in Queens, in New York City, in a middle class Jewish family. My mother was a public school teacher, my father was a lawyer. They were Democrats - kind of middle-of-the-road democrats.
America was not founded to improve health care or housing; it was founded for freedom.
Sometimes the results of a first free election will find the moderates so poorly organized that extreme groups can eke out a victory, as Hamas did when it gained a 44-to-41 percent margin in the Palestinian election of 2006.
There isn't any way for the people of Nicaragua to find out what's going on in Nicaragua.
