Quotes from Vali Nasr

What you have in Iraq is not just a society coming apart like Yugoslavia or Congo. What is at stake is not just Iraq's stability but the balance of power in the region.

President Barack Obama started by accepting the military's counterinsurgency, but came out of Afghanistan having decided that counterinsurgency actually doesn't work.

Better sixty years of tyranny than a single day of civil strife.

The Shia-Sunni conflict is at once a struggle for the soul of Islam… and a manifestation of the kind of tribal wars of ethnicities and identities… with which humanity has become wearily familiar.

Ultimately, the character of the region [the Middle East] will be decided in the crucible of Shia revival and the Sunni response to it.

We live in an age of globalisation, but also one of identity politics. It is as if our world is expanding and contacting at the same time.

We live in an age of globalisation, but also one of identity politics. It is as if our world is expanding and contracting at the same time.

Many nights during the war, Iranian soldiers would wake up to see a white-shrouded figure on a white horse blessing them. These apparitions of the Twelfth Imam were professional actors sent to boost morale. The common soldiers, often peasant boys raised in an atmosphere of simple piety, would then carry the tale to their relatives and friends in the villages and small towns they called home, if they lived to make it home.

My time in the Obama administration turned out to be a deeply disillusioning experience.