Michael Totten Quotes

108 Sourced Quotes

Lebanon may not be the most crucial country according to narrowly defined American interests, but like Tunisia, it's one of the few Arab countries that has had a real shot at building something resembling a democratic system during the last couple of years. Lebanon is divided against itself, though, as it always has been, and Syria and Iran are aggressively and even violently backing the anti-Western and anti-democratic side. With no one supporting Lebanon's pro-Western and pro-democratic side, there was ever only one possible outcome.

Michael Totten
Sexual assault in public is so pervasive in Egypt that the authorities ban men from some cars on the subway so women can get to work in the morning without being mauled.

Michael Totten
America is tired of being America, so Russia is being Russia again. While an exhausted and burned out United States wishes international migraines like the Syrian civil war would just go away, Russia is energized by the prospect of filling the vacuum and thus once again playing a major role on the world stage.

Michael Totten
Shockingly, only 32 percent of Millennials think it's absolutely essential that civil rights protect people's liberty. What on earth is going on? Partly it's a matter of historical experience. Those born in the 1930s were alive during Hitler's conquest of Europe. Those born a bit later have no memory of World War II, but they do remember Stalinist Russia, a more distant threat, but one that was still frankly terrifying. Those born later still have no memory of the darkest days of the Soviet Union, but they do remember the Cold War and the Berlin Wall.

Michael Totten
I stared at the city below out the window as I sipped my red wine. Havana looked like a glittering metropolis in the dark. Night washed away the rot and the grime and revealed nothing but city lights. It occurred to me that Havana will look mostly the same—at night, anyway—after it is liberated from the tyrannical imbeciles who govern it now. I tried to pretend that I was looking out on a Cuba that was already free and that the tables around me were occupied—by local people, not foreigners—but the fantasy faded fast. I was all alone at the top of Cuba's Elysium and yearning for home—where capitalism's inequalities are not so jagged and stark.

Michael Totten
What will become of Northern Ireland? It can't be neatly partitioned any more than Baghdad can be neatly partitioned.

Michael Totten
Would it be great if we could get along with Russia or reset relations? Of course. But it's not going to happen because there's not a damn thing you can to do change Russia's national interests or its centuries-long hostility toward its neighbors.

Michael Totten
To paraphrase Leon Trotsky, you may not be interested in war but war is interested in you.

Michael Totten
Trump has changed his position on Syria twice and even reversed himself once, but he still can't find the right answer... He said he thinks the Middle East would be better off if Saddam Hussein and Moammar Qaddafi were still in charge of Iraq and Libya, and that Syria will be better off if Bashar al-Assad remains in power for the same reason... He sounds like a random guy in a bar who's thinking out loud after reading a couple of newspaper articles that are fuzzy on the details. We all run into people like that once a while, people who don't really know anything about the Middle East but think they've got it all figured out anyway. He realizes it's hard, though, and figures, hey, let the Russians deal with it instead.

Michael Totten
If Turkey wasn't already in NATO, it would not be invited to join. Indeed, a lot of Americans want to kick Turkey out of NATO. Don't. It might be emotionally satisfying, but we're going to have to deal with the Turks whether we and they like it or not, and we'll get far better results if we do it within a cooperative framework than if we don't.

Michael Totten
Cuba is a police state and Che was its co-founder. Cubans 'love' him the same way Romanians 'loved' Nicolae Ceausescu and East Germans 'loved' Berlin Wall architect Erich Honecker. You know what happens to Cubans who display open hatred of Che? They get arrested. When he was still alive, they were executed or herded into slave-labor camps. So yeah, everyone 'loves' him. It's required by law. Woe to those who disobey State Security.

Michael Totten
Did somebody have a nice little chat about the 2 billion dollars in aid money we give Egypt every year?

Michael Totten
There were no violent Nazi-like demonstrations in the United States against Arabs or Muslims, not even on or after September 11, 2001, when ten times as many people were murdered in the most spectacular terrorist attack in world history.

Michael Totten
Trump's national security advisor is much more eager to fight a huge war than George W. Bush or Barack Obama. If you voted for Trump because you want less war instead of more, you're probably out of luck.

Michael Totten
The truth about Che now has its boots on. He helped free Cubans from the repressive Batista regime, only to enslave them in a totalitarian police state worst than the last. He was Fidel Castro's chief executioner, a mass-murderer who in theory could have commanded any number of Latin American death squads, from Peru's Shining Path on the political left to Guatemala's White Hand on the right.

Michael Totten
Arab Muslims born and raised in the United States are just as American as I am, but Arab Muslims born and raised in Belgium will never be Belgian. They may or may not be citizens of the state of Belgium, but they won't have a Belgian identity. A Belgian identity scarcely even exists. Most Belgians identify first and foremost as Dutch-speaking Flemish or French-speaking Walloons.

Michael Totten
Russia is not Belgium, and it is not Canada. It was one of only two superpowers until the Soviet Union imploded under the weight of its own belligerent imbecility, and it has been wallowing in a post-imperial funk, 'malaise' in Jimmy Carter's lexicon, ever since. It could theoretically regain some of its lost power as the West's partner, but being one of many is not how Russia rolls. Whenever Washington makes a friendly overture to Moscow, Russians interpret it the way Luke Skywalker heard Darth Vader say, between bouts of heavy mechanical breathing, 'Join me, and together we can rule the galaxy as father and son'.

Michael Totten
The Iranian government has been a malignant force since the day it seized power in 1979. It has taken diplomats hostage, destabilized one neighboring state after another—beginning with Lebanon, then moving to Iraq, Syria, Bahrain and Yemen—and created terrorist armies that have killed Americans, Israelis, Iraqis, Lebanese, Syrians and—yes—even Argentines. The Iranian government has done all this without nuclear weapons. The only reason it wasn't able to wreak even more havoc is because it was crippled by sanctions. That's over now.

Michael Totten
Russia is justifying its invasion of Ukraine's Crimean Peninsula by saying the ethnic Russians who live there are threatened by a nascent fascist regime in Kiev. The habits of Soviet propagandists die hard. What's really going on here is simple. Vladimir Putin, like most Russian leaders before him, feels he must shove his weight around the near abroad to maximize his power and influence in the thin buffer between him and the West. Now that he's without his vassal—mini-Putin, Viktor Yanukovych, is on the run—Moscow has to do the grunt work itself.

Michael Totten
Iran has been funding terrorism for decades. Iran hasn't stopped funding terrorism for even five seconds since the day it started. We can safely assume that since Iran funded terrorism yesterday, and that since the sun came up this morning, Iran is still funding terrorism today. And unless the government is overthrown before midnight tonight, it's safe to assume that Iran will continue funding terrorism tomorrow. Iran's rulers haven't even pretended to stop, so let's just cut through the B. S.

Michael Totten
A few years ago, the government stopped physically blocking Cubans from hotels and restaurants, partly because Raúl is a little more relaxed about these things than Fidel but also because most Cubans can't afford to go to these places, anyway.

Michael Totten
I've been unhappy with the Democrats for various reasons for almost ten years now. As time passes I have fewer and fewer reasons to stick with them... Democrats seem to think it's 1968 or 1972 all over again. And it isn't. They are decades out of date, and they're almost certain to lose.

Michael Totten
No more do I want to hear that Europeans are more sophisticated than Americans.

Michael Totten
I visited Iraq seven times during the war... Baghdad, while ugly and dangerous, is vastly freer and more prosperous these days than Havana. Anyway, Iraq is precisely the kind of country with which Castro wants you to compare Cuba. It's the wrong comparison. So are impoverished Third World countries like Guatemala and Haiti. Cuba isn't a developing country; it's a once-developed country destroyed by its own government. Havana was a magnificent Western city once. It should be compared not with Baghdad, Kabul, Guatemala City, or Port-au-Prince but with formerly Communist Budapest, Prague, or Berlin. Havana's history mirrors theirs, after all.

Michael Totten
Donald Trump, along with Bernie Sanders and Gary Johnson and so many others, talks about Iraq as if the Middle East would be fine if the Baath Party were left in place in Baghdad. It's a frankly ludicrous proposition. The Baath Party is still in place next-door in Syria, and how's that working out? These kinds of governments can only keep a lid on things until they can't.

Michael Totten
Northern Ireland is not homogeneous, and it is not pacifist. Belfast is the most car-bombed city in the history of Europe. There is no 'Northern Irish' identity that binds everybody together. The Catholic half of the population identifies with the Republic of Ireland while the Protestant half identifies with the United Kingdom.

Michael Totten
In 2005, Beirut looked and felt like a Middle Eastern version of Berlin in 1989... It turned out, Beirut was really more like Budapest in 1956.

Michael Totten
Almost everybody hates the Washington swamp, including lots of people who live there. Of all American institutions, Congress has the lowest approval rating, less than 10 percent, and the military has the highest at 73 percent. In the Middle East and Latin America, numbers like these would portend a military coup. But we don't live in the Middle East or Latin America. We live here. So instead of a military coup, we got Donald Trump.

Michael Totten
Of course sanctions have a negative effect on the economy, but the main cause of Cuban poverty is communist economics. Every communist country in the history of the world has been impoverished. It's a bankrupt system that has never worked and never can work. Here's just one reason why. The United States has a minimum wage while Cuba has a maximum wage. And that maximum wage is a paltry 20 dollars a month. No one can get ahead. It's impossible. It's illegal. When prosperity is a crime, there can be no prosperity, and that's entirely the fault of Cuba's communist party.

Michael Totten
I could only imagine how a Cuban would feel if he found himself whisked here from Havana with a ration card in his pocket and his state-imposed maximum wage of twenty dollars a month in his wallet. The only 'mall' I saw anywhere in Cuba was a dismal space, located inside a concrete box that looked like a parking garage and offering only the most meager selection of wares. I've been to better malls in Iraq.

Michael Totten