Even before 9/11 I was gripped by a sense of dread: our lack of criticism about what we were doing in the Middle East - the slagging off of a whole religious tradition.
For centuries, the Muslims were able to co-exist perfectly well with Jews and Christians in the Middle East.
Before I got into politics, I wanted to be a missionary to people in the Middle East. I thought it would be better to speak with them in their own language.
Certainly we've seen the enormous changes across the whole of the Middle East. The democratic genie is out of the bottle.
I don't understand this thing about [Bashar] Assad. He has to go. Assad is aligned with Iran and Russia. The one thing we want to prevent is we want to prevent Iran being able to extend a Shia crescent all across the Middle East. Assad has got to go.
We cannot continue to see the Middle East in the context of 9/11. We must see it in the context of 2011.
The Middle East is hopeful. There's hope there.
Terrorism has essentially become a franchise in the Middle East and North Africa and increasingly in other parts of the world.
A huge amount of what goes on in the Middle East has to do with people being fed really bad information.
We call for, actually, a weapons embargo to the Middle East, which we can lead since we are supplying the majority of weapons which, in fact, then find their way into all parties on all sides.
We need a new kind of offensive in the Middle East. It's called a peace offensive.
We call for a new kind of offensive in the Middle East because our current approach has a track record and it's not a good one.
There's nothing that the United States can do. Nothing that would change systems in the Middle East, nothing the United States can do that would make the Middle East a better place.
There's practical political considerations obviously, but there's also these broader themes, which is like, I don't want to be the manager of the Middle East.
We need to unleash the military in unison with our partners in Europe and the Middle East to be effective.
The price of oil is rising because of all the unrest in the Middle East. And the unrest in Wisconsin is causing the price of cheese to go through the roof.
Oil prices jumped to well over $100 a barrel, and analysts say it's due to tension in the Middle East. So, luckily, it's just a temporary thing.
I don't know that I would need to be famous as a Middle East policy expert to see that unilateral imperialism is bad policy.
Were there peace and justice in the Middle East, the Arabs would no more need their tinhorn dictators than they would their corpulent princes.
We know that russians are deeply engaged in supporting Assad because they want to have a place in the Middle East. They have a naval base, they have an air base in Syria.
We're working with our friends in the Middle East, many of which, as you know, are Muslim majority nations.
One has to remember that every progress that has been made towards peace in the Middle East has come under American leadership.
I have a background and an understanding of what's happened in the Middle East that a lot of people don't have, because there's been no interest.
There's always trouble in the Middle East. I can't recall any time in my life when there hasn't been trouble there.
I was a news reporter for 16 years, seven of them a foreign correspondent in the Middle East, Africa and the Balkans. Perhaps the most useful equipment I acquired in that time is a lack of preciousness about the act of writing. A reporter must write. There must be a story. The 'mot juste' unarriving? Tell that to your desk.
