Robert B. Baer QUOTES

3 " I took it, though, as an evil omen that the deck wasn’t cutting in our favor, and then was certain of it when the notorious Iraqi exile and convicted swindler Ahmed Chalabi charged onto the stage. Frankly, Chalabi was the last thing I needed. A University of Chicago and MIT grad, Chalabi had been convicted in Jordan for bank embezzlement. Resurrected by the CIA after the Gulf War, he now owed his political existence to Washington. It was our F-16s that kept Saddam from grabbing and lynching him; it was the United States he ran to when things got ugly. By rights, Chalabi should have been America’s obedient proxy who slavishly followed my orders. Instead, he treated me as if I were the mad uncle in the attic. He would pretend to listen to me, but as soon as I was out the door, he’d revert to his old conniving self. "

― Robert B. Baer , The Perfect Kill: 21 Laws for Assassins

4 " Society attacks early when the individual is helpless. —B. F. SKINNER "

― Robert B. Baer , The Perfect Kill: 21 Laws for Assassins

5 " Life is a shitstorm, in which art is our only umbrella. —MARIO VARGAS LLOSA "

― Robert B. Baer , The Perfect Kill: 21 Laws for Assassins

6 " Egypt is the next domino to fall and, as they say, so goes Egypt so goes the Middle East. "

― Robert B. Baer

7 " Destroying Iraq was the greatest strategic blunder this country has made in its history. Unless we change course, there's every reason to believe the Iraq War will end up changing the United States more than it will ever change Iraq. "

― Robert B. Baer

8 " On one level, Americans are too distant from the Middle East, too naive to understand its complexities and history. On another, it's the people who show up in Washington-Iranian and Arab exiles nursing a grudge, with time on their hands and money to pay for a hotel-who influence U.S. policy by default. They color Washington's view of the world, drawing us into foreign adventures we have no business being in. "

― Robert B. Baer , The Devil We Know: Dealing with the New Iranian Superpower

9 " The Saudi judicial system looks as if it were designed by Ghengis Khan. Saudi Arabia tops the world in public beheadings. "

― Robert B. Baer , Sleeping with the Devil: How Washington Sold Our Soul for Saudi Crude

10 " We can walk away from the moral consequences of our actions, but we can’t walk away from economic consequences. "

― Robert B. Baer , Sleeping with the Devil: How Washington Sold Our Soul for Saudi Crude

11 " The Saudis are active at every level of the terror chain, from planners to financiers, from cadre to foot-soldier, from ideologist to cheerleader. "

― Robert B. Baer , Sleeping with the Devil: How Washington Sold Our Soul for Saudi Crude

12 " The Saudi government probably spends more per capita than any other country in the world on arms. (It acknowledges only that it spends 13 percent of its gross domestic product, but half of its revenue is earmarked for the military.) "

― Robert B. Baer , Sleeping with the Devil: How Washington Sold Our Soul for Saudi Crude

13 " Every time you fill up your car with gas that has its beginning as Saudi crude—and statistically, that should be about one in every five or six times you pull up to the pump—you’re contributing something like a dollar toward keeping Saudi royal heads attached to their necks. "

― Robert B. Baer , Sleeping with the Devil: How Washington Sold Our Soul for Saudi Crude

14 " Franklin D. Roosevelt plays a part, as does the eighteenth-century tribal chief Muhammad Ibn Sa’ud. So does another eighteenth-century Arab, Muhammad ibn ‘Abd-al-Wahhab and the archconservative thirteenth-century cleric Ibn Taymiyah. And so, finally, do the fruits of all the malignant seeds planted by Ibn Taymiyah: the Muslim Brotherhood. "

― Robert B. Baer , Sleeping with the Devil: How Washington Sold Our Soul for Saudi Crude

15 " There was a Wahhabi way to sneeze, embrace, shake hands, yawn, kiss, dress, and so on. There was even a Wahhabi way of reinterpreting physics; strict Wahhabis believe the world is flat. (If this begins to conjure images of the Taliban rule in Afghanistan, there’s a good reason.) "

― Robert B. Baer , Sleeping with the Devil: How Washington Sold Our Soul for Saudi Crude

16 " Anger against the West and particularly the United States spills all over the Land of Islam. But there are groups that all the signs keep pointing to—the Wahhabis, the Muslim Brotherhood, and al Qaeda, of course—and there’s one place that serves more than any other as the principal backer: Saudi Arabia. "

― Robert B. Baer , Sleeping with the Devil: How Washington Sold Our Soul for Saudi Crude

17 " Things are even worse than they seem. Saudi Arabia doesn’t have what we would call a rule of law. Look inside a Saudi passport: It states that the holder “belongs” to the royal family. A Saudi commoner is chattel, a piece of property no different from an Al Sa’ud’s Jeddah palace or his Rolls-Royce Silver Cloud. "

― Robert B. Baer , Sleeping with the Devil: How Washington Sold Our Soul for Saudi Crude

18 " In other words, no matter what country you buy your oil from, Saudi Arabia determines world price by how much oil it chooses to produce. "

― Robert B. Baer , Sleeping with the Devil: How Washington Sold Our Soul for Saudi Crude

19 " The equations have changed. One report sent to the United Nations Security Council indicated that Saudi Arabia transferred half a billion dollars to al Qaeda in the ten years beginning 1992. "

― Robert B. Baer , Sleeping with the Devil: How Washington Sold Our Soul for Saudi Crude

20 " The kingdom’s mosque schools have become hothouses of militant Islam, the breeding grounds of Sunni terrorism. "

― Robert B. Baer , Sleeping with the Devil: How Washington Sold Our Soul for Saudi Crude

1
2