Quotes by Dexter Filkins - Page 1

The overriding goal of counterinsurgency is to make friends: You make friends with the people; you isolate the insurgents.
Dexter Filkins / Journalist
Isolate
Overriding
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Let me just say, I think there's a reasonable criticism to be made of the Obama administration on the way that it left Iraq.
Dexter Filkins / Journalist
Administration
Criticism
Reasonable
Obama Administration
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It's so jarring to go from Baghdad to Cambridge, to go from a place where people are fighting and striving and dying to a place where the biggest concern is what kind of cheese to put in your sandwich.
Dexter Filkins / Journalist
Baghdad
Cambridge
Cheese
Concern
Dying
Fighting
Jarring
Striving
Sandwich
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Any American who has spent time in Iraq or Afghanistan will tell you: the closer you get, the less certain you are of anything. If you are in Iraq, if you are in Afghanistan, everything is ambiguous. Everything is murky and gray and uncertain and possibly lethal.
Dexter Filkins / Journalist
Afghanistan
Ambiguous
Gray
Uncertain
Time Will American
Closer
Lethal
Murky
Possibly
Spent
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The American surge of combat forces into Baghdad that was ordered by President Bush worked. And there was a calm, a relative calm that descended on the country kind of late 2008. That pretty much held until the last American combat soldiers left at the end of 2011.
Dexter Filkins / Journalist
Baghdad
Calm
Combat
Late
President
President Bush
Relative
Surge
Bush
Descended
Forces
Held
Ordered
Soldiers
Worked
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In war, people find themselves in extraordinary circumstances, and in those circumstances, they act in extraordinary ways. In war, you see people at their very best and their very worst, acting in ways you could never imagine. War is human drama at its most epic and most intense.
Dexter Filkins / Journalist
Circumstances
Epic
Extraordinary
Intense
Extraordinary Circumstances
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The whole kind of post-World War I settlement that formed the modern Middle East is in danger of collapsing, and we can - we, the United States, you know, the preeminent power in the world - we can say that we want to ignore that, but how long can we avert our gaze? And how long can we stay out?
Dexter Filkins / Journalist
Avert
Danger
East
Middle East
Settlement
World War I
War Power World
Collapsing
Formed
Gaze
Ignore
World War
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The expectation in the Obama Administration, or at least the hope, is that a nuclear deal with the West could ultimately moderate Iranian behavior by helping to integrate the country more thoroughly into the international system. Will this happen? It's impossible to predict, of course. We will only know if we get there.
Dexter Filkins / Journalist
Administration
Helping
Nuclear
Predict
Expectation
Integrate
Moderate
Obama Administration
Thoroughly
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It is one of the great ironies of the American war in Iraq - was that the guys who really got the most out of it were the Iranians. And they have us to thank for that. Yeah, I mean we basically put Maliki in power in 2006, but he has been - he's really not a friend of the United States. He's a friend of the Iranian regime.
Dexter Filkins / Journalist
War Power Great
Iranian Regime
Thank
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I think - I think the real nightmare place now is less Afghanistan than it is Pakistan. I mean, again, Pakistan is this gigantic country, deeply troubled, kind of almost ungovernable, sitting on top of probably 50 or 60 nuclear warheads. Nobody really knows where the warheads are; the Americans certainly don't know where they are.
Dexter Filkins / Journalist
Afghanistan
Nightmare
Nuclear
Pakistan
Gigantic
Nuclear Warheads
Troubled
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The most basic barrier was language itself, very few Americans in Iraq whether soldiers or diplomats or news paper reporters could speak more than a few words of Arabic. A remarkable number of them didn't even have translators. That meant for many Iraqis the typical 19 year old army corporal from South Dakota was not a youthful innocent carrying Americas good will, he was a terrifying combination of firepower and ignorance.
Dexter Filkins / Journalist
Army
Ignorance
Years
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