Jimmy Carter Quotes

The troops are therefore empowered and are in duty bound in this war to use without mitigation even against women and children any means that will lead to success.

We've been talking about this for a good while, the immorality of drones, dropping bombs on innocent people. It's been over 200 children so far. These are war crimes.

The last thing we want to do is to go into an area and inflict unnecessary civilian casualties. One is too many.

No, the United States does not target civilians.

The only difference between Obama and Bush is that Obama is killing more people.

It is a rule of international law that weapons and methods of warfare which do not discriminate between combatants and civilians should never be used.

This happened within the politics of national security implemented by the Guatemalan army in which the people were considered an internal enemy. If the Guatemalan army was guilty here it was at the instruction of the United States, so the government of the United States should be seated here [along with the army defendants.]

The difference between us and the terrorists is that when we kill innocent civilians, we do so by accident. When they kill innocent civilians, they do it deliberately.

Under no circumstances may nuclear weapons or other instruments of mass slaughter be used for the purpose of destroying population centers or other predominantly civilian targets. Retaliatory action which would indiscriminately and disproportionately take many wholly innocent lives, lives of people who are in no way responsible .for reckless actions of their government, must also be condemned.

According to the laws of war, a warring party can just walk away from civilian harm that they have caused.

For the most part, I think American armies are awfully good in the business of protecting civilians, of not going over the line.

This entire business of modern war crimes, as identified by the liberal wings of politics and the media, began in Iraq and has been running downhill ever since.

In other words, United States, our values, the way that we occupy ourselves in terms of saying here's the way we stand in this country when we go to war, it's not that we go in and we kill off anybody, including families. We don't take the riches. We don't claim the women. My God, that's not America.

Do we really think that the United States will have the protection of innocent Afghans in mind if it rains terror down on the Afghan infrastructure? We are supposedly fighting them because they immorally killed innocent civilians. That made them evil. If we do the same, are we any less immoral?

I did not feel very patriotic. I did not feel proud of our country, seeing that we were bombing peasant villages, that we were not just hitting military targets, that children were being killed. We were terrorizing the North Vietnamese with our enormous Air Force. They had no Air Force at all. They were a little pitiful country and we were terrorizing them with our bombs. And no, I did not feel proud at all.

Neoconservatives and the Pentagon have good reason to fear the return of the Vietnam Syndrome. The label intentionally suggests a disease, a weakening of the martial will, but the syndrome was actually a healthy American reaction to false White House promises of victory, the propping up of corrupt regimes, crony contracting and cover-ups of civilian casualties during the Vietnam War that are echoed today in the news from Baghdad.

I did not feel proud of our country, seeing that we were bombing peasant villages, that we were not just hitting military targets, that children were being killed. We were terrorizing the North Vietnamese with our enormous Air Force. They had no Air Force at all. They were a little pitiful country and we were terrorizing them with our bombs. And no, I did not feel proud at all.

The picture of the world's greatest superpower killing or seriously injuring 1,000 noncombatants a week, while trying to pound a tiny backward nation into submission on an issue whose merits are hotly disputed, is not a pretty one.

The invasion of Panama, what was that? The U.S. killed, according to the Panamanians, 3,000 civilians. Maybe they're right. We don't investigate our own crimes, so nobody knows.

Continuous wars - which we have now had since 2001 - starting with Afghanistan, continuing on to Iraq. And even since Iraq, it's been more or less continuous. The appalling war in Libya, which has wrecked that country and wrecked that part of the world, and which isn't over by any means. The indirect Western intervention in Syria, which has created new monsters. These are policies, which if carried out by any individual government, would be considered extremist. Now, they're being carried out collectively by the United States, backed by some of the countries of the European Union.

It's troubling to see how often Winston Churchill is a proponent of massive programs that are really aimed at civilians - starvation blockades and chemical warfare stockpiles and so on.

There are pros and cons about the policy decision whether to follow the Geneva Conventions in a war where they do not legally apply. Among the pros might be benefits for America's image, its ability to argue in future conflicts that the Conventions should be followed, and training soldiers to follow only the Geneva standards. Among the cons might be greater security and safety for our troops who capture and detain al Qaeda operatives and the ability to gather more actionable intelligence swiftly.

If you are going to kill the families of terrorists, realize that there's something called the Geneva Convention we're going to have to pull out of. It would defy every norm that is America.

I don't regret at all saying that if I saw Bashar al-Assad using chemical weapons on his people that that would change my assessments in terms of what we were or were not willing to do in Syria.

And just as your beautiful skyscrapers were destroyed and caused your grief, beautiful buildings and precious homes crumbled over their owners in Lebanon, Palestine, and Iraq by American weapons.... Americans should feel the pain they have inflicted on other peoples of the world, so as when they suffer, they will find the right solution and the right path.