I blame the Russians for a lot, but pinning the creation of ISIS on them is a murky, tenuous, triple-carom bank shot at best. Michael Hayden Read Quote
President Obama came to office with a strong belief that America had overreached, that we had become too involved. It matched the national mood, and indeed, there was some evidence that it was true. Michael Hayden Read Quote
I’ve often said that the ISIS-Syria-Iraq mess is about as bad as it could be. Michael Hayden Read Quote
I know of no government official who would welcome an army of inspectors general combing through four years of emails on their unclassified accounts. That’s why they use government accounts, where the government remains responsible for security, and they don’t mingle personal correspondence with official. Michael Hayden Read Quote
Americans are very practical folks. Accustomed to hard choices in their own lives, they are willing to give us in intelligence a lot of slack as we make the hard choices our profession demands. Michael Hayden Read Quote
Dissenting analysts passionate about their positions are not unusual in the American intelligence community. Their presence – or even the rejection – of their favored positions is not prima face evidence of politicization. Michael Hayden Read Quote
Undersecretary of Defense Doug Feith was equally insistent in 2002-2003 about an operational relationship between al Qaeda and the Iraqi government. Michael Hayden Read Quote
My experience has been that military assessments on ‘how goes the war’ are consistently more optimistic than those made by the CIA and other agencies. Michael Hayden Read Quote
Islamist terrorism.’ The very phrase is contentious. No one wants to make this problem harder by unfairly branding and alienating a quarter of the world’s population, and even in this construction, no one should be thinking this means all of Islam or all Muslims. Michael Hayden Read Quote
At the end of the 30 Years War then, Europe broadly decided to separate the sacred from the secular in its political culture. I know that is an oversimplification, but it is instructive, and it led to a growth in religious tolerance that has characterized the best of Western life since. Michael Hayden Read Quote
