George McGovern 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.

The war in Iraq, the abuse of detainees, electronic eavesdropping, Guantanamo Bay - these things were all done on our behalf and they may turn out in the end to have created more terrorists.

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

The old saying that war is a racket has taken on an even more shameful meaning.

Instead of the international police action we had hoped for during the war in Kosovo, there are wars again - conducted with state-of-the-art technology, but still in the old style.

There are people who cannot forget, as neither do I, the lesson of the years of the Indochina War. Which was, first, that the state is capable of being a murderer. A mass murderer, and a conspirator and a liar.

It seems like such a terrible shame that innocent civilians have to get hurt in wars, otherwise combat would be such a wonderfully healthy way to rid the human race of unneeded trash.

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

Surely our inaction with respect to Syria is a poor precedent if we're fighting a war on terror.

It is not surprising that most Pakistanis do not support America's bombardment of Afghanistan. The Afghans are neighbours on the brink of starvation and devastated by war. America has shown itself to be untrustworthy, a superpower that uses its values as a scabbard for its sword.

Human-rights advocates, for example, claim that the mistreatment of Iraqi prisoners is of a piece with President Bush's 2002 decision to deny al Qaeda and Taliban fighters the legal status of prisoners of war under the Geneva Conventions.

No one has the right to ignite a war and lead an occupation and armies to conquer people, invading them and make them suffer all kinds of torture, murder, expulsion, displacement, bombing and terrorism by different lethal prohibited weapons and then come and speak as the savior of the people or a defender of their rights.

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 war in Iraq will end, our troops will come home, Bush will be impeached and he will be brought to justice.

Every attempt to make war easy and safe will result in humiliation and disaster.

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

The unvarnished truth is that we have spent the last decade funding the machinery of war, and our children have been sacrificed.

We should invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity. We weren't punctilious about locating and punishing only Hitler and his top officers. We carpet-bombed German cities; we killed civilians. That's war. And this is war.

If I were an innocent individual, flown to a foreign country and held for several years and tortured, I'd become a terrorist, too. I'd go to war against the U.S.

It is my conviction that killing under the cloak of war is nothing but an act of murder.

We've killed a million Iraqis since the start of the Gulf war - mostly by blocking humanitarian aid.

What ultimately happened is that my country had a war. I think it would be extraordinary, as a writer, not to want to write about that.

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.

My level of cynicism about the reasons that took us to war against Iraq remain just as well-developed as they were before I went.

Anyone who has ever looked into the glazed eyes of a soldier dying on the battlefield will think hard before starting a war.