Elliott Abrams

Four years is a long time in politics. ”

In the Bill Clinton years, the foreign leader who visited the White House most often was Yasser Arafat - 13 times. ”

At the United Nations, a lynch mob for Israel is always just a moment away. ”

Immanuel Kant famously claimed that 'he who wills the ends wills the means,' but he never spent much time in Washington. ”

I would have thought that if you're going to try to punish the Syrians and prevent them from using chemical weapons again, the thing to do is a one-time strike. Maybe a cruise missile strike at one or two of their air bases just so they know what they're going to gain from using chemical weapons on the battlefield. ”

The threat that Syria might transfer more advanced weapons to Hezbollah has existed for a long time. ”

I well remember a leading Egyptian liberal saying to me in 2003 that she did not favor free elections right then in Egypt; she favored them in a decade's time if she and others had those 10 years to organize freely. ”

From its earliest days in the nineteenth century, and until the Holocaust, the Orthodox rabbinate in eastern Europe was not enthusiastic about the Zionist movement, which at the time was led by irreligious Jews. ”

Grasping the realities of the Middle East is never easy. This is not primarily because they change quickly, but because so much time, effort, and money is spent to prevent reality from breaking through. ”

Bahai Iranians are barred from holding government jobs, their children are excluded from the nation's university system, their marriages are not recognized and their cemeteries and holy places have been desecrated. It is government policy to incite hatred of Bahais in the official media. ”