Bill Clinton Quotes

I don’t care how precise your bombs and weapons of war are. When you set them off, innocent people will die.

That's generally true of people who drop bombs from high altitudes. You don't know what's going on below. You don't see the human consequences of what you're doing.

If civilians are going to be killed, I would rather have them be their civilians than our civilians.

If there is one lesson for U.S. foreign policy from the past 10 years, it is surely that military intervention can seem simple but is in fact a complex affair with the potential for unintended consequences.

If the innocent people who died in the attack on Afghanistan, and those who have been dying from lack of food and medical care in Iraq, are considered collaterals, are not the 3,000 who died in New York and the 200 in Bali also just collaterals, whose deaths are necessary for the operations to succeed?

The Iraq War is an incredibly strategic blunder of enormous proportions …. There was not an exit strategy because the people planning this war didn’t intend to leave.

Anyone who has ever studied the history of American diplomacy, especially military diplomacy, knows that you might start in a war with certain things on your mind as a purpose of what you are doing, but in the end, you found yourself fighting for entirely different things that you had never thought of before ... In other words, war has a momentum of its own and it carries you away from all thoughtful intentions when you get into it. Today, if we went into Iraq, like the president would like us to do, you know where you begin. You never know where you are going to end.

Since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, the number of violent extremist groups has grown across multiple continents. From Syria to Somalia to Pakistan, the United States is combating many of these groups - usually with bombs and missiles. Large numbers of innocent people are invariably caught in the middle.

The only thing about sanctions is that, like a lot of drone strikes, there are countless unintended victims. Cutting off aid to Uganda only increases the pain there.

It is a tough choice. In war, people die. But when we refuse to confront the enemy, we will face the enemy in New York and Washington, as we did on 9-11. As for responsiblity, of course we stand by our decision to go to war on Iraq. President Kennedy said that friend and foe alike should know where America stands.

Even limited military actions end up carrying with them great costs and unintended consequences.

While the nature of warfare is changing and wars are moving into cities, they are also becoming longer and their consequences more impactful.

No Afghans, as far as we know, have been involved in terrorist acts against our country. We shouldn't be swatting at hornets' nests we know nothing about.

It doesn't take much insight to realize that wars have been getting worse every time - worse from the point of view of the civilian, more and more destructive, more and more total.

I'm always interested in a character who does something and doesn't understand why they've done it.

What part of 9/11 is big? If the future continues to reinterpret the past, it could be argued that 9/11 provides irrefutable proof that unless there is some other way that we learn to deal with our technology or deal with our brothers and sisters, it is goodbye as a species. That genie does not leave that bottle.

I do think that I have a better sense of how military action can result in unintended consequences.

Can't make an omelette without killing a few people.

We killed 6 innocent people, launching 22, I think $3 million apiece missiles on Baghdad...that's a little bit overdoing it.

I would say of all the things that have happened during the course of my presidency the knowledge that you have hundreds of thousands of people who have been killed, millions who have been displaced, [makes me] ask myself what might I have done differently along the course of the last five, six years.

Some of the worst wrongs, were caused by people who tried to change things.

The term blowback, which officials of the Central Intelligent Agency first invented for their own internal use, . . . refers to the unintended consequences of policies that were kept secret from the American people. What the daily press reports as the malign act of terrorists or drug lords or rogue states or illegal arms merchants often turn out to be blowback from earlier American operations.

Frankly, our ancestors don't seem much to brag about. I mean, look at the state they left us in, with the wars, the broken planet. Clearly, they didn't care about what would happen to the people who came after them.

People know what they do; frequently they know why they do what they do; but what they don't know is what what they do does.

Now, in answer to the question would we use force in the Middle East. I don't know...I hope not. We have no plans to, it is conceivable, I guess. It would be almost as bad as the seven days in May. You conjure up a situation where there is another oil embargo, and the people in this country are not only inconvenienced and uncomfortable, but suffer.