Zbigniew Brzezinski Quotes
Because when you kill 300 people, 400 people, who have nothing to do with the provocations Hezbollah staged, but you do it in effect deliberately by being indifferent to the scale of collateral damage, you're killing hostages in the hope of intimidating those that you want to intimidate. And more likely than not you will not intimidate them. You'll simply outrage them and make them into permanent enemies with the number of such enemies increasing.
Brzezinski, Zbigniew. Interview by Wolf Blitzer. Late Edition with Wolf Blitzer, CNN, 23 July 2006.
This is always a problem in parts of the world where conflicts operate with many different parties and theater are personal grudges and scores to settle.
60,000 English men, women, and children had been killed by German terror bombing of London and other English cities. The policy had been to retaliate and bomb German population centers. Over 4 million British homes had been destroyed by the blitz and Churchill was becoming concerned that when the Allies would occupy Germany shortly, there would be no German housing left for the civilian population much less for the Allied occupying forces. Churchill’s Air Attaché persuaded him NOT to send the memorandum with it’s references to the terror bombing in retaliation. The memorandum was rewritten with the references to “terror” removed. The bombing of cities did stop as a result.
The British and American bombing of Germany had become so effective that most of the German industrial system was destroyed. However, early in the War, Germany had violated the Geneva Convention and was indiscriminately bombing London and other part of England. In addition the German Air Force had bombed Warsaw, and many other cities throughout Europe. The German’s had killed over 20 million Europeans. When the Allied bombing produced high collateral damage against civilians, some argued that even though German had deliberately used this tactic, the allies should stop the saturated bombing if there were to be high civilian collateral damage. Others argued that it was unfortunate but a military necessity. There were others like Brenen, who argued that killing German women and children was desirable and just.
Ironically, one of the major objections to drone strikes is that they have caused civilian casualties.
Hamas had fired thousands of rockets and other missiles at Israeli population centers—war crimes under the Geneva Conventions. Israel finally retaliated against Hamas facilities in Gaza. However, in an unprecedented effort to avoid civilian casualties, the Israeli Defense Forces warned the people by indicating which targets they were going to strike. They also dropped leaflets in Arabic telling the civilians that they are not the targets but to try and avoid harm to them and their families, they should evacuate the neighborhoods that would be under attack. Hamas had placed their missile launchers and other weapons in and near schools, hospitals, mosques and civilian housing risking their civilian population—see {640841}.
Zbigniew Kazimierz Brzezinski was a Polish-American diplomat and political scientist. He served as a counselor to President Lyndon B. Johnson from 1966 to 1968 and was President Jimmy Carter's National Security Advisor from 1977 to 1981. As a scholar, Brzezinski belonged to the realist school of international relations, standing in the geopolitical tradition of Halford Mackinder and Nicholas J. Spykman. Brzezinski was the primary organizer of The Trilateral Commission.
