Peter Bergen Quotes
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The sitting prime minister, Jose Aznar, who had strongly backed the U.S.-led Iraq War, was unseated by a challenger who then pulled Spanish troops out of Iraq. The Madrid terrorist attacks are generally regarded as being the key to why Aznar, who had been leading in the polls, was defeated.
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Bin Laden had come to the delusional conclusion that the United States was as weak as the Soviet Union had once been.
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One of the themes of 'The Longest War,' my book, which came out before the Arab spring happened, was how al-Qaida and bin Laden was losing the war of ideas in the Muslim world, not because the United States was winning them, but because al-Qaida was simply losing them.
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If a parent knows that their kid is suddenly becoming infatuated with ISIS, they face a very difficult choice, which is, you know, do I - what do I do?
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McMaster, 54, is the smartest and most capable military officer of his generation, one who has not only led American victories on the battlefields of the 1991 Gulf War and of the Iraq War, but also holds a Ph.D. in history.
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Sheikh Rahman's fatwa was the first time that anyone associated with al Qaeda had given religious sanction to attacks on American aviation, shipping and economic targets.
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Typically, terrorist attacks produce a rally-around-the flag effect as was the case after 9/11 and the huge outpouring of public support that then-President George W. Bush garnered.
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An intelligence officer and historian, Rayburn published a 2014 book, 'Iraq After America,' which is a must-read for anyone who wants to understand how Iraq descended into chaos in the years after the American troop withdrawal at the end of 2011.
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A key to McMaster's thinking is his 1997 book, 'Dereliction of Duty: Lyndon Johnson, Robert McNamara, the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the Lies that Led to Vietnam.'
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In Yemen, the United States conducted more drone strikes in 2016 than any year except 2012, the peak of the campaign in the country, according to data collected by New America.
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The commonly accepted definition of terrorism is that it is politically motivated violence directed at civilians by entities other than a state. These kind of attacks can come from the far right, the far left, racists of every stripe, as well as jihadists.
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Officials in the George W. Bush administration later criticized the cruise missile strikes that were ordered by President Bill Clinton in Afghanistan in 1998 as only 'pounding sand.'
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There are all sorts of despicable people who journalists have done interviews with, and it's been useful. Isn't more information better than less information?
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Compounding Iraq's problem is that its economy is highly dependent on oil.
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9/11 was a sort of hinge event in American history, and all jihadi terrorist plots or attacks are kind of filtered through that lens.
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Before 9/11, al-Qaeda was an organization of global reach.
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What bin Laden had hoped to achieve in Afghanistan in the post-9/11 period, which was to drag the United States into a protracted guerrilla war like the one he had fought against the Soviets, never happened. Instead, that protracted guerrilla war is now playing out in Iraq, in the heart of the Middle East.
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On the campaign trail, candidate Trump occasionally raised the idea of creating 'safe zones' for Syrian civilians.
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The Russians have been waging wars with these separatists since the 19th century, but for obvious reasons, Chechen separatist terrorism tends to be carried out by Chechens.
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The Sunni militants that make up ISIS are not the underlying problem in Syria and Iraq, but rather they are a symptom of other deeper problems.
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More than a decade and half after 9/11, U.S. military actions in countries such as Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan and several other Muslim nations are governed by the Authorization for the Use of Military Force (AUMF) that was passed in the days immediately after 9/11.
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When ISIS and al Qaeda have attacked or plotted attacks in the West in the past decade or so, they have invariably used hydrogen peroxide-based bombs because acquiring military-grade explosives or dynamite is nearly impossible for would-be terrorists in Western countries.
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Anne Richard, a senior U.S. State Department official, testified at a Senate Homeland Security Committee hearing in November 2015 that any Syrian refugee trying to get into the United States is scrutinized by officials from the National Counterterrorism Center, FBI, Department of Homeland Security, State Department and Pentagon.
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In mid-November 2001, as they moved toward the city of Kandahar, the Taliban's de facto capital in southern Afghanistan, Amerine's team called in airstrikes against advancing Taliban units and more or less obliterated a Taliban column of a thousand men that had been dispatched from Kandahar. It was the Taliban's final play to remain in power.