Michael Totten - American Quotes

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A mob set fire to the Saudi embassy in Tehran, stormed the compound and trashed its offices while Iranian security personnel stood aside. This is hardly anything new. The Iranian government has been violently contemptuous of worldwide norms of diplomacy ever since it seized power in 1979. The Iranian hostage crisis, where Islamist revolutionaries held 52 foreign servicemen and women hostage at the American Embassy for 444 days, was just the beginning. Four years later, Iran's terrorist proxies in Lebanon used to a suicide truck bomb to destroy the American embassy in Beirut. Ten years later they blew up the Israeli embassy in Argentina, also with a suicide truck bomb.

Michael Totten
There are five times as many Muslims in the United States as there are in Belgium, but the United States is not a hotbed of homegrown Islamic extremism. We've suffered some acts of terrorism since 9/11—the mass shooting in San Bernardino, the Boston Marathon bombing and the massacre at Fort Hood. If American Muslims and European Muslims were equally predisposed to jihadism, we'd experience roughly five times as many attacks. But we don't, mostly because Muslims feel more at home in the United States than they do in Europe.

Michael Totten
It's astonishing. It's probably the most pro-American place in the world. Certainly the most pro-American place I've ever been.

Michael Totten
And at least the U.S. got something out of the deal. At least our people are still among the living when they come home... Iran committed three criminal acts against American citizens and paid no price. We put kidnappers in prison for a very long time in this country, but the Iranian government was rewarded. What's to stop that government from doing it again? Nothing. Why should the Iranian government stop? Kidnapping and ransoming hostages works. And the regime is already gearing up to do it again.

Michael Totten
Nothing has actually changed except the American mood. Using ground troops in Syria and Iraq is no better or worse an idea after San Bernardino that it was before. The downsides are the same and at this point should be obvious. Lives will be lost, and some of them will be ours. American soldiers can't fix what ails the Middle East. Sure, they can overthrow dictators. They can kill terrorists and push them out of territory. But eliminating the appeal of a fascistic ideology is something else entirely. Replacing a totalitarian regime with some kind of functioning democracy in lands riven by ancient sectarian hatreds and hobbled by political and religious extremism is something else entirely.

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

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
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
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
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
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
Latin America veers far more wildly from the extreme left to the extreme right than the West does, but it's not the Middle East. Every Latin American country so far except Cuba has reverted to democratic rule after a period of dictatorship. One way or another, Venezuela will get there eventually. Maduro isn't at all likely to die in bed while in office like Chávez did in 2013. He'll lose an election, the army will put him in jail, or he'll be strung up, Mussolini-style, from a Caracas lamppost. Whenever it finally happens, though, that country will face a long dig-out.

Michael Totten
I don't think it's right to compare German gullibility to American gullibility by pointing out, for example, that lots of Americans falsely believe Saddam Hussein was involved with the September 11 attacks. There is a qualitative difference between believing Saddam was behind an attack on America and believing that the American government was behind an attack on America. It is at least plausible that Saddam had something to do with it, even though he didn't. The idea that the U.S. government committed that deed is insane.

Michael Totten
Americans are good at solving problems. We've put men on the moon, cured countless diseases, and invented nearly all modern technology from televisions and telephones to microchips and the Internet. We created a durable democracy that has lasted more than 200 years, ended slavery, destroyed Hitler's Nazi regime, and bested the Soviet Union during the Cold War. Surely, then, we can solve terrorism, or at least drastically reduce it, but let's get one thing clear. There is no such thing as The Answer. There is no silver bullet, no magic wand, no perfectly calibrated piece of legislation that Congress can pass to make terrorists leave us alone.

Michael Totten
Nearly all Che's victims were Cuban. Would Americans love a foreign implant who murdered thousands, forced thousands more into slavery, and drove more than a million to exile? Of course not.

Michael Totten
Look at a map again. Iran is a powerful state in the middle of the same Eurasia where Putin is building his union. An alliance of some sort with Iran isn't strictly required, but it's certainly helpful. At the very least, Putin wants good relations with the Iranians. And he wants America and American-friendly regimes away from his underbelly for the same reason he wants them off his western flank in Europe, where he fears the West and its economic and military alliances might encroach.

Michael Totten
British Muslims are losing the war against ISIS. So says Sunny Hundal in a new essay in Quartz magazine. 'For the vast majority of Muslims who disdain its ideology', he writes, 'the challenge that presents to them is deadlier and far more difficult because they are caught in a pincer movement: with public and government suspicion on one side, and a seductive and supposedly empowering ideology on the other'. According to the FBI, around 200 American Muslims have left the United States to join ISIS. And according to the International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation and Political Violence, 600-700 British Muslims have left the United Kingdom just this year alone.

Michael Totten
The American president, the Commander-in-Chief of the United States Armed Forces, is practically a foreign policy dictator. You can start wars without going through Congress. Congress and the public will complain, don't kid yourself about that, but it will be too late. You can end wars—or at least choose to stop fighting and let them continue without you. You can order daring raids against the likes of Osama bin Laden if you think you know where they're hiding, you can forge and unmake alliances, and you can initiate all kinds of black ops that the public is unlikely to discover as long as they don't catastrophically fail.

Michael Totten
The United States has a long history of successfully integrating immigrants, including Arab immigrants... Two-thirds of American Muslims earn more than 50,000 dollars a year, and a fourth earn more than 100,000 dollars a year. That's hardly the profile of a failed immigrant group. Europe, though, has a much harder time with this sort of thing, and Germany is in an uproar.

Michael Totten
A majority of American Muslims view themselves as Americans first, rather than as Muslims first, whereas 81 percent of British Muslims view themselves as Muslims first. French Muslims are as likely as American Muslims to identify first with the nation-state they live in, but France is the only country in Europe that has seriously attempted to nurture a French identity among its immigrant populations. Europe's Muslim population feels far more alienated from the general society, so it's easier for a violent anti-Western ideology to find traction. And when trouble erupts, as it is now, Europeans react far more harshly than Americans do.

Michael Totten
It is a brutally repressive sectarian theocracy that uses militias and international terrorist organizations to advance its ambitions. Iran is actually the biggest state sponsor of international terrorism in the world, and it has been our chief adversary in the Middle East since followers of Ayatollah Khomeini took 52 American diplomats hostage at our embassy in Tehran following the 1979 revolution.

Michael Totten
Americans won't likely ever forget how the supposedly 'sophisticated' European opinion-makers said America's chickens were coming home to roost when al-Qaeda destroyed the World Trade Center, and how we, for one brain-dead reason or another, had it coming. I wonder what Europeans think of that attitude now.

Michael Totten
Terrorism in the United States didn't begin with ISIS, nor will it end with ISIS. Syed Rizwan Farook and Tashfeen Malik would almost certainly have taken up arms if ISIS didn't even exist. Their desire and ability to murder American citizens was unrelated to who controls the streets of Raqqa and Mosul. The upside of using ground troops may be a little less obvious. At least it was less obvious until recently. ISIS can be defeated militarily, at least temporarily. It has happened before.

Michael Totten