Elvis Mitchell Quotes

'Bombing Afghanistan back into the Stone Age' was quite a favourite headline for some wobbly liberals. The slogan does all the work. But an instant's thought shows that Afghanistan is being, if anything, bombed out of the Stone Age.

We now prepared authorize bombing specific targets in [Guatemala City] area since you and feel this now the most effective move to achieve success. Targets should be selected with a view to having desired effect on army and regime morale with minimum political cost to [the United States].

… a war of the world

Before our kids start coming home from Iraq in body bags and women and children start dying in Baghdad, I need to know, what did Iraq do to us?

There seems to be a sense in the British media that prime ministers enjoy going to war. They do not. The decision to send British soldiers into battle is the worst and most stomach-churning senior politicians have to take. It makes them wake up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat worrying if they have done the right thing.

The question is the morning after. What sort of Iraq do we wake up to after the bombing? What happens in the region? What impact could it have? These are questions leaders I have spoken to have posed.

The real trouble with war (modern war) is that it gives no one a chance to kill the right people.

Waging an unnecessary war is a grave mistake.

It's odd being an American now. Most of us are peaceful, but here we are again, in our fifth major war of this century.

On one level, bombing ISIS is easy. The U.S. knows where the group operates. There's no need for a ten-year hunt like the one for Osama bin Laden. The terror group has two capital cities: Mosul in Iraq and Raqqa in Syria. Al-Qaeda never had such an obvious home address.

It is hard as an American to support the failure of American military operations in Iraq. Such failure will bring with it the death and wounding of many American service members, and many more Iraqis.

When you besiege a city with guns and aircraft, you are driving the good citizens and the bad elements together.

Democracies are prone to war, and war consumes them.

In wars, serious mistakes are made.

A war with Pakistan would be an utter disaster.

Among the achievements celebrated in Trump's first 100 days are the 59 cruise missiles launched at the Syrian airfield from which the gas attack on civilians allegedly came, and the dropping of the 22,000-pound MOAB bomb in Afghanistan. But what did these bombings accomplish?

I'm reporting on a world at war.

I've always been interested in the politics of war. War is one of those things that, the longer I studied it, the more illogical it seemed.

War is in truth a disease in which the juices that serve health and maintenance are used for the sole purpose of nourishing something foreign, something at odds with nature.

During my lifetime, America has been constantly waging war against much of humanity: impoverished people mostly, in stricken places.

The bombs the government drops in Iraq are the bombs that blew up in New York City.

War may be an auction for countries. For soldiers it's a lottery.

We don't have victory. I mean, we're dropping our - we're dropping things all over the place. Who knows what they're hitting. Who knows how many people are being killed and who knows if they're the right people.

Nothing is more destructive than the charge of artillery on a crowd.

It is always easy to begin a war, but very difficult to stop one.