Eric Alterman Quotes

I don't think the British or American governments really want to fight the Islamic State. They just want to look as if they are doing so.

There isn't a war on terror, there is a war of terror.

Stopping terror is clearly a pretext.

What I am going to tell you is this: Although it is commonly believed that the War on Terrorism is a noble effort to defend freedom, in reality, it has little to do with terrorism and even less to do with the defense of freedom.

And if you look at all this academic work in the conferences and so on there's a constant theme that terrorism is extremely hard to define and we therefore have to have a deep thinking about it. And the reason it's hard to define is quite simple. It's hard to find a definition that includes what they do to us but excludes what we do to them. That's quite difficult. So it takes a global war on terrorism.

We declared war on terror-it's not even a noun, so, good luck.

We need to wage this war against ISIS from the air, on the ground, and online, in cyberspace.

Since war itself is the most extreme form of terrorism, a war on terrorism is profoundly self-contradictory.

When you look around now we have the war on terror. Yes, okay, the World Trade Center was sort of like a single act of war, but nothing else has been. We've turned it into war. We're talking about a bunch of semi-lunatic, fanatic criminals. That's the way they should be treated.

The war on terror, I believe, will be waged by effective intelligence and police work and cruise missiles.

The first casualty when war comes is truth.

Despite recent media reports that have clouded, or even misrepresented, the facts, there is compelling evidence that al-Qaida and Iraq have been linked for more than a decade.

Everyone, when there's war in the air, learns to live in a new element: falsehood.

People in the Pentagon had colleagues killed and maimed by bin Laden. They're trying to find bin Laden and kill him and his cult. Naturally they consider that a legitimate thing to do, but they're having mixed success at the job.

The terrorists and their supporters declared war on the United States - and war is what they got.

To a degree, the West is reaping what it sowed from a major strategic blunder in the aftermath of 9/11 - the entire concept of a war on technique, that is, terrorism. Defining the enemy when fighting a concept was impossible.

The missiles come first, and the justifications come second.

If it is terrorism, if it is war on terror, then the Afghan people will join you on terror.

Nevertheless, the mode, the justification, and all the games involved in this war were dishonest.

Spontaneous operations performed by individuals and cells here and there over the whole world, without connections between them, have put the local and international intelligence apparatus in a state of confusion, as arresting the members of aborted cells does not influence the operational activities of others who are not connected with them.

In a war, as indeed at most times, we become the ready victims of phrases.

Everybody in Afghanistan ought to know we’re coming in and hells coming with us.

Are we in a state of war against terrorism, or does that require a declaration in order for us to fight.

The war on terrorism is a war of ideas.

No sir, anybody who went out and got into the front line trenches to fight for liberty was a goddamn fool and the guy who got him there was a liar.