Seymour Hersh Quotes

Soldiers will continue to die in wars that few can convincingly explain why we are fighting.

People like to talk about war.

Politicians didn’t want to talk to their constituents about body bags that would be coming back.

People are worried about if somebody's going to say that I'm Islamophobic or what have you. This is craziness because we are at war. That's why I asked congress, go ahead and declare the war .

War is death. If we are to engage in war, then we should have to stare it straight in the face and call it by its rightful name.

Obama is making a choice now that will lead to the deaths of many thousands of civilians in Afghanistan by American hands. By ordinary standards of presidents, he is a decent man. But those standards aren't good enough. He's in a position either to kill or not to kill, and he's made the decision to kill.

People have a very political way of looking at war, and that's understandable.

It is often noted that it can be hard for democracies to fight wars because of changing public opinion.

Too many policy decisions over the years have been made by men in closed rooms not thinking about the dead bodies. When bullets fly, people die. Pictures ram that message home.

Wars ruin armies.

Conscription may have been good for the country, but it damned near killed the country.

It’s very easy to advocate going to war if you’re not one of the people who is going.

The question in my mind then is how many additional American casualties is Saddam worth? And the answer is not very damned many.

The sad reality of war is that if you are going to be in day-to-day combat, there are going to be casualties.

It will plow under every fourth American boy.

It is very difficult to do one's duty. I was considered a barbarian because at the storming of the Praga, 7,000 people were killed. Europe says that I am a monster. I myself have read this in the papers, but I would have liked to talk to people about this and ask them: is it not better to finish a war with the death of 7,000 people rather than to drag it on and kill 100,000.

Politics is the womb in which war develops.”

In every war, innocent people die.

The sponsors of war closely resemble the weapons they create. And smart bombs, depleted uranium, land mines, rockets and tanks, rather than protect 'widows and orphans and strangers at the gate', are designed precisely to create 'widows and orphans', to transform strangers into enemies and enemies into corpses.

When people want to inspire you to turn against some group of people, they'll often use empathy. When Obama wanted to bomb Syria, he drew our attention to the victims of chemical warfare. And in both of the Iraq wars, politicians said, "Look at the horrific things that are happening." I'm not a pacifist. I think the suffering of innocent people can be a catalyst for moral action. But empathy puts too much weight on the scale in favor of war. Empathy can really lead to violence.

I don't really understand the point about carping about every casualty, every bombing, every death. War is hell. That's why people say war is hell.

Barack Obama has done more than anyone else to promote the dangerous illusion that we can choose whether to have a war or not. But our enemies have already made that choice. Retired Marine Corps General James Mattis said: “No war is over until the enemy says it's over. We may think it's over, we may declare it over, but in fact, the enemy gets a vote“.

There was in the House only one dissenting vote, from Barbara J. Lee, a Democrat from California, who warned that military action could not guarantee the safety of the country and that 'as we act, let us not become the evil we deplore.

so few people realize that preparedness never leads to peace, but that it is indeed the road to universal slaughter.

He had grown up in a country run by politicians who sent the pilots to man the bombers to kill the babies to make the world safer for children to grow up in.