Ali McKraken Quotes

It’s hard to know whether drone strikes have provoked more anger than other forms of Western power.

Ground combat almost always kills more civilians than drone strikes do.

Outside the context of armed conflict, the use of drones for targeted killings is almost never likely to be legal.

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

They target and try to kill as many of our civilians as they can. We do not target civilians..

… civilian casualties [with drone attacks] have proved formidable. Haphazard intelligence has often been to blame, as earn local tipsters have provided the United States with false information in order to take out innocent rivals.

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

The essential effect of war on a citizen's conscience is nothing but a legalization and glorification of things that in times of peace constitute crime.

The discomfort of my colleagues, where it existed, didn’t stem from targeted killing itself.... The discomfort existed because it felt like we were doing something, on a large scale, that we’d sworn not to. Most of us felt as though we were violating Executive Order 12333.

I think the reason that drones have become so controversial is because they're used in Pakistan; they're used in Yemen; they've been used in all kinds of places.

Bombing Syria will achieve nothing.

I've got no problem with drone strikes.

'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.

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.

The actions of the terrorist organizations, Hezbollah, in Lebanon, and Hamas, in Gaza, against Israel are unconscionable. Instead of working towards peace, these terrorist organizations have chosen to perpetuate the violence.

You know what I had a problem with? The war - the war in Afghanistan.

I cannot grasp the difference between killing people with drones or rifles and knives. The objective in war is to kill the enemy before he kills you. I can't fathom the almost religious zeal with which the use of drones is being opposed.

There was never a good war, or a bad peace.

I know war as few other men now living know it, and nothing to me is more revolting. I have long advocated its complete abolition, as its very destructiveness on both friend and foe has rendered it useless as a method of settling international disputes.

The war on terror is the most insane and immoral war of all time. The Americans are doing what they did in Vietnam, bombing villages. But how can a civilised nation do this? How can you can eliminate suspects, their wives, their children, their families, their neighbours? How can you justify this?

We know that U.S. voters, and world leaders, allow Obama extraordinary leeway when it comes to deadly drone strikes, precisely because of his politics, character and background. (We are talking about a man, after all, who won the Nobel Peace Prize while ordering the automated killing of suspected Muslim terrorists around the world).

Saddam Hussein was a brutal tyrant. I am glad he is now on trial for crimes against humanity. But, opposition to a dictator is not the measure I use when deciding whether to send our men and women in uniform off to war and possible death.

War is failure of diplomacy.

When the Georgian army started this assault against the sleeping city of Tskhinvali, the Georgian peacekeepers, serving in one contingent with their Russian friends, joined the army and started killing the Russian comrades in arms.

A sane person doesn't think war is a good idea.