Peter L. Bergen Quotes

The war on terror, sometimes known as the 'Global War on Terror' or by the clunky acronym GWOT, became the lens through which the Bush administration judged almost all of its foreign policy decisions. That proved to be dangerously counterproductive on several levels.

- Peter L. Bergen

The Japanese scored an important victory at Pearl Harbor, but the attack pulled the United States into World War II, and four years later, Japan was in ruins, utterly defeated.

- Peter L. Bergen

Trump himself has not laid out a clear agenda on the national security issues that are the most pressing for the United States, from the resurgence of the Taliban in Afghanistan to the deepening Syrian civil war to the fight against ISIS in Iraq and Syria and the flexing of Russian muscles under President Vladimir Putin.

- Peter L. Bergen

Virulent anti-Semitism is, of course, a staple of militant Islamist ideology.

- Peter L. Bergen

Certain Gulf Arabs support proxy jihadist Sunni groups such as al Qaeda's affiliate in Syria, while Iran supports Shia militant forces such as Hezbollah.

- Peter L. Bergen

For many, embracing the ideology of Osama bin Laden or ISIS allowed them to become the heroes of their own story as well as actors in a cosmic crusade. For others, a 'cognitive opening' to militant Islam was often precipitated by a personal disappointment or loss.

- Peter L. Bergen

Tamerlan Tsarnaev, one of the two brothers who carried out the marathon bombing, was a non-practicing Muslim who only became an Islamist militant once his dreams of becoming an Olympic boxer faded. At the time of the attack, he was unemployed.

- Peter L. Bergen

Information-sharing between Western governments about the identities of those who have traveled to Syria and have received militant training is the key to preventing more incidents such as the one at the Jewish Museum in Brussels.

- Peter L. Bergen

Bin Laden was 200 miles away from the area where all of these drone strikes were taking out his key leaders, he was able to indulge in his hobbies... and he was making occasional video tapes and audio tapes to the wider world.

- Peter L. Bergen

The Bush administration's approach to the war on terror collided badly with another of its doctrines, spreading democracy in the Middle East as a panacea to reduce radicalism.

- Peter L. Bergen

Osama bin Laden fervently hoped that attacking the United States would create pressure on American leaders to reduce their support for Middle Eastern regimes. Bin Laden believed that without that American support, the Arab regimes would collapse and would be replaced by Taliban-style rulers.

- Peter L. Bergen

Hersh's account of the bin Laden raid is a farrago of nonsense that is contravened by a multitude of eyewitness accounts, inconvenient facts, and simple common sense.

- Peter L. Bergen

The inattention of the Bush administration to the threat from al Qaeda had results. Shortly before 9/11, Bush's attorney general, John Ashcroft, turned down FBI requests for some 400 additional counterterrorism personnel.

- Peter L. Bergen

Mattis has been sharply critical of President Barack Obama's policies on Iran and Obama's capping of troop numbers and campaign end-dates in theaters of war such as Afghanistan and Iraq. Mattis also appears to be a skeptic of the Obama-era policy of putting women into combat roles.

- Peter L. Bergen

What is tricky for those hoping to utilize such weapons is that TATP bombs are quite difficult to make because their ingredients, when combined, are highly unstable and can explode easily if mishandled.

- Peter L. Bergen

During the campaign, Trump in many ways repudiated President Obama's national security and foreign policy approach on issues like the Iran nuclear deal and immigration. So there's a real question of continuity or disruption with Trump, which wouldn't have existed if Clinton was president-elect.

- Peter L. Bergen

Because Scotland and Northern Ireland want to remain part of the E.U., there is the quite real possibility that Scotland and even Northern Ireland might now choose to go their own way on membership within the E.U. and the 'United Kingdom' would suddenly effectively be only England and Wales.

- Peter L. Bergen

Common sense would tell you that the idea that Saudi Arabia was paying for bin Laden's expenses while he was living in Abbottabad is simply risible. Bin Laden's principal goal was the overthrow of the Saudi royal family as a result of which his Saudi citizenship was revoked as far back as 1994.

- Peter L. Bergen

The Second Amendment is, of course, very much part of the American fabric. But the intent of the founders was that the amendment protected the rights of citizens to bear arms in a militia for their collective self-defense.

- Peter L. Bergen

Without U.S. forces in the country, there is a strong possibility Afghanistan could host a reinvigorated Taliban allied to a reinvigorated al Qaeda.

- Peter L. Bergen

Trump has long been a fan of Vladimir Putin but seems to be unaware that Russia's goal in Syria is simply the maintenance of its longtime ally President Bashar al-Assad in power. Indeed, Moscow has hitherto shown little appetite to focus on ISIS.

- Peter L. Bergen

President-elect Donald Trump has a host of national security challenges to deal with as he assumes office, from the resurgence of the Taliban in Afghanistan to the grinding Syrian civil war to the flexing of Russian muscles under President Vladimir Putin to how to deal with ISIS as the terrorist army retreats in Iraq.

- Peter L. Bergen

Think of ISIS as a pathogen that preys on weak hosts in the Muslim world. In fact, there is something of a political law: The weaker a Muslim state, the stronger will be the presence of ISIS or like-minded groups.

- Peter L. Bergen

Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad belongs to the small Alawite sect and is therefore considered a heretic by many Sunnis; al-Assad runs a secular regime, and therefore he is considered by Sunni militants to be an apostate, and he is inflicting a total war on his Sunni population.

- Peter L. Bergen

The civil war across the Middle East between the Shia and the Sunni empowers groups like ISIS and al Qaeda who claim to be the defenders of Sunni rights against Shia attack.

- Peter L. Bergen

Syria is attracting a lot more Westerners than the Iraq War ever did because it's the perfect Sunni jihad.

- Peter L. Bergen

In Syria, a no-fly zone targeted at Assad's air force and safe zones for refugees fleeing the fighting would help tamp down the death toll that plays into the hands of ISIS and other Sunni militants who can position themselves as the only groups that are really defending the Sunni population.

- Peter L. Bergen

Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein brutally repressed all forms of opposition to his regime, and before the Iraq War, al Qaeda had no presence in Iraq.

- Peter L. Bergen

How can you prevent an attack by returning foreign fighters if you are not cognizant of their names and links to ISIS?

- Peter L. Bergen

The fact is, working stiffs with few opportunities and scant education are generally too busy getting by to engage in revolutionary projects to remake society. And history, in fact, shows us that terrorism is generally a bourgeois endeavor.

- Peter L. Bergen

The dangers of TATP bombs can be seen in the case of Matthew Rugo and Curtis Jetton, 21-year-old roommates in Texas City, Texas. They didn't have any bomb-making training and were manufacturing explosives in 2006 from concentrated bleach when their concoction blew up, killing Rugo and injuring Jetton.

- Peter L. Bergen

There is no hint that Trump wishes to engage in or to foment violence against the enemies, such as immigrants, he has identified as undermining the American way of life.

- Peter L. Bergen

Imprisoned by its war on terror framework, the Bush administration supported Israel in a disastrous war against Hezbollah in Lebanon in the summer of 2006.

- Peter L. Bergen

Six years after al-Awlaki was born, his family moved back to Yemen, but he returned to the States for college and remained there for much of his adult life.

- Peter L. Bergen

Anwar al-Awlaki was a U.S. citizen by virtue of his birth in Las Cruces, New Mexico, in 1971 while his Yemeni father was studying at New Mexico State University.

- Peter L. Bergen

We climbed the stairs to the third floor, where Osama bin Laden died early in the morning of May 2, 2011.

- Peter L. Bergen

The United States didn't ban Italian immigration in the 1920s because a small minority of Italians became members of the Mafia, and the country is a richer place for it.

- Peter L. Bergen

The less the ISIS 'caliphate' exists as a physical entity, the less the group can claim it is the 'Islamic State' that it purports to be.

- Peter L. Bergen

At one point people in al Qaeda were actually drawing monthly paychecks when they were based in Sudan.

- Peter L. Bergen

The rise of ISIS starts with a Jordanian thug named Abu Musab al-Zarqawi who founded ISIS' parent organization, al Qaeda, in Iraq. What gave Zarqawi the opportunity to create al Qaeda in Iraq? It was, of course, George W. Bush's decision to invade Iraq in 2003.

- Peter L. Bergen

Bush administration officials, of course, deny that they didn't take the threat urgently enough, but there is no debating that in their public utterances, private meetings, and actions, the al Qaeda threat barely registered.

- Peter L. Bergen

What made al-Awlaki so influential is that, unlike a number of leaders of al Qaeda such as Osama bin Laden, he was a cleric, so he could present himself as a leading religious figure. Second, because al-Awlaki had spent much of his adult life in the States, he communicated with his followers in colloquial, accessible American English.

- Peter L. Bergen

Apostasy is a grave crime in Islam and punishable by death in the eyes of members of al Qaeda.

- Peter L. Bergen

It is very much in America's national security interests to ensure that the Taliban do not dominate Afghanistan and that neither ISIS nor al Qaeda continues their growth in the country.

- Peter L. Bergen

Some might say that that while al Qaeda the organization may be basically dead, its ideology continues to thrive and to inspire 'lone wolves' to attack the United States.

- Peter L. Bergen

ISIS is even at war with its most natural ally, al Qaeda in Syria.

- Peter L. Bergen

One only has to look at the debacle that has unfolded in Iraq after the withdrawal of U.S. troops at the end of 2011 to have a sneak preview of what could take place in an Afghanistan without some kind of residual American presence.

- Peter L. Bergen

The E.U. is the latest of a series of multinational organizations set up after World War II to ensure that there would never again be a pan-European war and to create the conditions for a new European prosperity after the destruction wrought by the war against the Nazis. The E.U. has admirably succeeded at both.

- Peter L. Bergen

Since Snowden went public, companies such as Apple and Google - two of the world's most valuable companies - have incorporated much greater encryption into their products and have also been at pains to show that they will not go along with U.S. government demands to access their encrypted products.

- Peter L. Bergen

A key flaw of the Obama administration's approach to Afghanistan has been constantly announcing proposed withdrawal dates for U.S. forces, which has enabled the Taliban to believe they can simply wait out the clock.

- Peter L. Bergen

If the party of Lincoln wishes to become the party of intolerance, selecting Trump to be its presidential candidate is a good way forward.

- Peter L. Bergen

Trump displays many of the traits of a proto-fascist, and he is also part of a wave of right-wing nationalist movements that is sweeping the West. He can also be positioned in the long, American right-wing tradition of fearing 'the Other,' whether they are Catholics or Jews or, now, Muslims.

- Peter L. Bergen

Seymour Hersh is one of the giants of investigative journalism.

- Peter L. Bergen

The Obama administration has framed its defense of the controversial bulk collection of all American phone records as necessary to prevent a future 9/11.

- Peter L. Bergen

American jihadists are generally motivated by a mix of factors, including dislike of U.S. foreign policy in the Muslim world.

- Peter L. Bergen

Trump has long said he favors a 'safe zone' in Syria to prevent Basher al Assad's regime from carrying out indiscriminate airstrikes against Syrian civilians and to halt the refugee flow out of Syria.

- Peter L. Bergen

Keeping a relatively small, predominantly U.S. Special Forces presence in Afghanistan to continue to train the Afghan army past December 2016 is a wise policy that would benefit both Afghans and Americans.

- Peter L. Bergen

Pakistan's key leaders have succumbed to the assassin's bullet or bomb or the hangman's noose, and the country has seen four military coups since its birth in 1947. Yet the Pakistani polity has limped on.

- Peter L. Bergen

ISIS' key social media-encrypted platform is Telegram, which is engineered by a Berlin-based tech company that can simply ignore the rulings of American federal judges as well as legislation passed by the U.S. Congress.

- Peter L. Bergen

Occasionally, Donald Trump says something that is politically incorrect but which also happens to be true.

- Peter L. Bergen

Rather than making loose and unsubstantiated claims that Obama and Clinton created ISIS, it would behoove Trump if he advanced some real policy ideas about how to solve the Syrian and Iraqi civil wars. Of course, to do that he would have to get beyond the inflammatory slogans and sound bites that have characterized his campaign.

- Peter L. Bergen

President Obama and a small team of senior national security officials were in the unusual position of acting as al-Awlaki's jury, judges, and de facto executioners.

- Peter L. Bergen

The Nazis and the Khmer Rouge went to great lengths to hide their crimes against humanity. Instead, ISIS posts its many crimes on social media for global distribution with seemingly no thoughts for the consequences.

- Peter L. Bergen

The image we have of bin Laden in his final years in Abbottabad is of an aging man with a graying beard watching old footage of himself; just another suburban dad flipping though the channels with his remote.

- Peter L. Bergen

'Zero Dark Thirty' is a great piece of filmmaking and does a valuable public service by raising difficult questions most Hollywood movies shy away from, but as of this writing, it seems that one of its central themes - that torture was instrumental to tracking down bin Laden - is not supported by the facts.

- Peter L. Bergen

Trump's pronounced anti-immigrant stance is reminiscent of both Le Pen in France and Orban in Hungary, although he is far from alone in taking such positions in much of today's Republican Party.

- Peter L. Bergen

In picking Gen. Jim Mattis for Defense secretary, President-elect Donald Trump has said that he found his 'Gen. George Patton.' Yet that label may not really capture what makes Mattis a distinctive choice.

- Peter L. Bergen

I stepped into the bedroom where he was killed and looked up at the ceiling, where you could still see the patterns of blood that had spurted from bin Laden's head when the bullet fired by a U.S. Navy SEAL tore through the terrorist leader's face.

- Peter L. Bergen

Every lethal terrorist attack in the United States since 9/11 has been carried out by an American citizen or a legal permanent resident, not by recent immigrants or by refugees. So tamping down immigration won't fix the real issue, which is 'homegrown' terrorism.

- Peter L. Bergen

Since Trump is not quick to forgive the merest of slights, it's hard to imagine him calling on any of the officials who have publicly taken a stand against him to serve in key national security slots.

- Peter L. Bergen

What did U.S. officials have to lose by saying that bin Laden was being protected by the Pakistanis, if it were true?

- Peter L. Bergen

Americans generally regard themselves as belonging to an exceptional nation. And in terms of living in a religiously tolerant and enormously diverse country, Americans can certainly take some justified pride.

- Peter L. Bergen

The diagnosis that poverty, lack of education, or lack of opportunities have much to do with terrorism requires a fundamentally optimistic view of human nature. This diagnosis leads to the prognosis that all we need to do to solve the terrorism problem is to create societies that are less poor, better educated and have more opportunities.

- Peter L. Bergen

Nothing is more powerful than hearing from former members of the group that ISIS is not creating an Islamist utopia in the areas it controls, but a hell on earth.

- Peter L. Bergen

Adding to your list of enemies is never a sound strategy, yet ISIS' ferocious campaign against the Shia, Kurds, Yazidis, Christians, and Muslims who don't precisely share its views has united every ethnic and religious group in Syria and Iraq against them.

- Peter L. Bergen

European countries simply do not have the ideological framework the United States has in the shape of the 'American dream' that has helped to absorb successfully wave after wave of immigration to the States, including Muslim Americans who are well integrated into American society. There is no analogous French dream or German dream.

- Peter L. Bergen

It is in Pakistan's own interest that the Afghan army is able to fight effectively against the Taliban, which is more likely if they continue to have American advisers at their side.

- Peter L. Bergen

Today, we are not likely to need to organize local militias for our defense now we have something called the Pentagon.

- Peter L. Bergen

The centerpiece of the Bush administration's case for going to war in Iraq was Secretary of State Colin Powell's presentation to the U.N. Security Council on February 5, 2003, six weeks before the invasion.

- Peter L. Bergen

I was the only outsider to visit the Abbottabad compound where bin Laden lived before the Pakistani military demolished it.

- Peter L. Bergen

In February I secured permission to enter Osama bin Laden's compound in the northern Pakistani city of Abbottabad, where he was killed and where he had lived for the last half-decade of his life; the first, and only, journalist to do so.

- Peter L. Bergen

And in the end, bin Laden died in a squalid suburban compound surrounded by his wives and children and far from the front lines of his holy war.

- Peter L. Bergen

While the story about the hunt for bin Laden has been exhaustively reported and the key sources and witnesses are in agreement about the main points of the narrative, of course, it's still possible that we could learn new details about the story that would add to the narrative.

- Peter L. Bergen

If the CIA and other U.S. intelligence agencies were private companies and were chronically unable to accomplish one of their key missions, their shareholders would have long ago revolted, fired their management, and their stock would be trading at values near zero.

- Peter L. Bergen

Trump has claimed he knows more about ISIS than America's leading generals. Clearly, this is also total nonsense; he doesn't seem to have done the slightest thing to educate himself about ISIS.

- Peter L. Bergen

The reason that Islamist militants can assert that jihad is necessary against the perceived enemies of Islam is that there is sufficient ammunition in the Quran to buttress their beliefs. The same could also, of course, be said for the Old Testament, which is full of scenes of violent death visited on the enemies of God.

- Peter L. Bergen

Trump, of course, has been very wrong in the past about important issues such as President Barack Obama's place of birth and Mexican immigrants, but the Republican frontrunner is correct in saying that former Republican President George W. Bush did not keep the country safe during the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

- Peter L. Bergen

Islam is, to be sure, a big tent, and the one and a half billion Muslims in the world run the gamut from mystical, moderate, pacific Sufis to Salafists.

- Peter L. Bergen

So Pakistan is a country that I'm very fond of and have spent a lot of time, but it is a country where conspiracy theories have a life of their own.

- Peter L. Bergen

ISIS may be a perversion of Islam, but Islamic it is, just as Christian beliefs about the sanctity of the unborn child explain why some Christian fundamentalists attack abortion clinics and doctors.

- Peter L. Bergen

For many terrorists, carrying out an attack allowed them to become the heroes of their own story.

- Peter L. Bergen

The reality is that Trump's focus on immigrants is to misconceive of the terrorist problem that exists in the United States.

- Peter L. Bergen

For Islamist terrorist groups such as ISIS, the holy month of Ramadan - a time of fasting and prayer for the vast majority of Muslims - is seen as a particularly auspicious time to launch terrorist attacks.

- Peter L. Bergen

There is considerable merit to the notion of treating gun violence as a public health matter.

- Peter L. Bergen

Like the attack on Pearl Harbor, another hinge event in American history, 9/11 was a great tactical victory for America's enemies. But in both these cases, the tactical success of the attacks was not matched by strategic victories. Quite the reverse.

- Peter L. Bergen

I am very suspicious of the notion that somehow bin Laden was a media creation... Bin Laden's actions made him into a big deal. Not the media.

- Peter L. Bergen

I've interviewed multiple people who know bin Laden... who tend to have a universal picture of what he's like, which is: modest, retiring, unassuming, kind of thoughtful - lots of things that don't fit with a mass murderer, which he is as well.

- Peter L. Bergen

Investigations by special prosecutors can take on a life of their own.

- Peter L. Bergen

In quiet ways far too complex to hold Trump's interest, Muslims in the United States and around the world are helping every day to prevent massacres such as Orlando from happening.

- Peter L. Bergen

In short, the hunt for bin Laden could not have been accomplished without every form of American intelligence-gathering.

- Peter L. Bergen

The dirty little secret of the intelligence world is that much of what you really need to know isn't exactly a secret anyway.

- Peter L. Bergen

When Congress passed the Authorization for the Use of Military Force immediately after the 9/11 attacks, no one could have imagined this authorization would continue to be the basis for American wars that persist a decade and a half later.

- Peter L. Bergen

Bin Laden's death is just a punctuation point on a set of problems they've had for a long time. I think the prognosis for al-Qaida and groups like it is really bad, and that's a good thing.

- Peter L. Bergen

The deep problems that afflict the Middle East are not easy to fix, but they must be dealt with if we are not to see a son of ISIS, or even a grandson of ISIS, developing in the years to come.

- Peter L. Bergen

Bin Laden comes out of a business background - he studied public administration and economics at university, and he worked for his family company, which was obviously a rather successful enterprise.

- Peter L. Bergen

It's hard to imagine any Muslim fessing up to their secret proclivity for Sharia law knowing they would be deported if they gave the wrong answer.

- Peter L. Bergen