Barack Obama Quotes

The drones are really interesting - how have the troops withdrawn from Afghanistan? Because we've upped the drone strikes and most of the country doesn't even really know what that means or who we're killing or... it's such a new weapon that we don't know what the long term impacts of that kind of military action is going to be.

In America, we're getting too comfortable with our ability to take kinetic strikes around the world without having enough process to avoid consistently the kinds of civilian casualties that can end up actually hurting us in the war against radicalization.

Counter insurgency is something we can’t do, can’t do well, and shouldn’t be doing.

We are using missile defense to protect our civilians, and they're using their civilians to protect their missiles.

Drones are sort of the perfect weapon for a country that doesn't want to go to war. It only - there's no fingerprint. There's no direct involvement. There's human beings killed on the other end. You never see them. You don't have to worry about them. You don't have to meet their widows. It's sort of an antiseptic warfare.

If we accept the notion that terrorists will have immunity because as they fire on civilians they hide behind civilians, then this tactic will be legitimized and the terrorists will have their greatest victory.

Two days after the Boston marathon bombings, there was a drone strike in Yemen attacking a peaceful village, which killed a target who could very easily have been apprehended. But, of course, it is just easier to terrorise people. The drones are a terrorist weapon; they not only kill targets but also terrorise other people.

In full accordance with the law - and in order to prevent terrorist attacks on the United States and to save American lives - the United States government conducts targeted strikes against specific al-Qa'ida terrorists, sometimes using remotely piloted aircraft, often referred to publicly as drones.

Drones can be a highly effective way of dealing with high-priority targets, but they should not become the drug of choice for an administration that is afraid to use successful, legal and safe tactics of the past.

Where land mines are indiscriminate, cheap, and brutal, drones are discriminate, expensive, and brutal. And yet they are insufficiently discriminate: the assassination of the Taliban chief Baitullah Mehsud in Pakistan in 2009 succeeded only on the seventeenth attempt.

The administration asserts that two thirds or three quarters of al-Qaeda’s managers have been captured or killed, and that al-Qaeda must therefore be on the ropes. Why spend vast sums defending against it?

Fighting terrorists does not require half a trillion dollars worth of conventional and nuclear forces.

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

Under our rules of engagement, if I were ISIS, what I would do is collocate my headquarters next to a school or a hospital and ensure that there would be collateral damage. They know our rules of engagement as well as we do. They operate with impunity.

In my view, it is only when civilians are protected that we will defeat ISIS, and until that is at the centre of our plan, I will remain an outspoken advocate for that cause.

I've got no problem with drone strikes.

Armed drones have become Barack Obama's way to engage in terrorist-infested hellholes without putting 'boots on the ground.' For years, the CIA has been running a secrecy-shrouded program of targeted killings in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Yemen, and more recently in Somalia, Syria and Iraq.

We are a country that met successes in the fight against terrorism.

Hamas hides among unwitting civilians, who have no way of controlling its activities. This fact does not give Israel the right to kill innocent non-combatants, not even unintentionally. Besides, murder is not "unintentional" when you know it is inevitable.

The drones are a terrorist weapon, they not only kill targets but also terrorise other people.

In military terms, if you're not winning, sometimes you are losing. We've seen the Taliban and associated terrorist organizations make gains in recent years. It's time to stop those gains and roll them back. There's a lot of different techniques to do so, but we cannot allow Afghanistan to once again become an ungoverned country from which terrorist organizations can launch attacks against the United States and our citizens.

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.

What I do know is that drones are a modern weapon. When used effectively, when taking out ISIS or terrorist leaders, that's pretty impressive. When bombing wedding parties of innocent people and killing dozens of them, that is, needless to say, not effective and enormously counterproductive. So whatever the mechanism, whoever is in control of that policy, it has to be refined so that we are killing the people we want to kill and not innocent collateral damage.

We argued, as did the security services in this country, that the attacks on Afghanistan and Iraq would increase the threat of terrorist attack in Britain. Tragically Londoners have now paid the price of the government ignoring such warnings.

Our strategy right now is to accelerate the campaign against ISIS. It is a threat to all civilized nations.