Jacob Weisberg Quotes

People talk about smart sanctions and crippling sanctions. I've never seen smart sanctions, and crippling sanctions cripple everyone, including innocent civilians, and make the government more popular.

But it is important to observe that when Europe or the United Nations impose sanctions that are supposed to be aimed against a certain regime, usually generally millions of people end up being directly punished.

I hope the example of Saddam Hussein will give a lesson to leaders of other countries where human rights are not respected.

I strongly support European sanctions against Mugabe and his ruling clique. We must do all in our power to help the people of Zimbabwe achieve their freedom and prosperity once again.

There are severe limitations on civil rights. In the international arena, Iran is turning into an isolated country, and the international community is becoming more hostile toward it.

You have no right to criticise Russia over Chechnya.

Some leaders think time will solve the problem. Their hope is that Assad's regime will ultimately fall from the heavy toll of the horrors it has spawned. From past experience with such regimes, this scenario is unlikely to happen.

Saddam Hussein has been brutal against his people, but when he was committing those crimes, the international community did not come to the rescue of the Iraqis.

Actually I can't imagine Nato troops on the ground and I think it's also important to send that very clear message to the UN and other organisations right now so that appropriate plans can be in place in due time and the Gaddafi regime can collapse soon.

I have nothing but contempt for Gadhafi. I'm not a Gadhafi supporter in any way. However, it's not clear to me that it's a vital and compelling national security objective of the United States that we ought to use military force to remove him from power. He's not the only unpleasant and unsavory dictator in the world.

It is good that the Canadians are raising the flag among Western countries to raise the issue of human rights abuse throughout the Middle East.

There is no doubt Assad deserves every missile we fire at him, but there's one big problem with air strikes - there is absolutely no proof it has any deterrent effect on Assad. To the contrary, history tells us these strikes will most likely quicken the pace of his assault on his own people.

Ultimately, the goal of sanctions is to ratchet up the economic pressure on the Iranians to such a level that the regime determines it is simply too great to bear, and they are forced to weigh the decision to carry on their nuclear development and their illicit quest for nuclear weapons against the ever-growing pressure from their own people.

Biden's support for Mubarak in the face of his falling regime sends a powerful and unfortunate message to the Arab world that their freedoms are negotiable.

Genocide and oppression not confined to the pages of history or memorials like Yad Vashem. They are taking place today, in our world. Nearly half a million black Africans have died in Sudan's Darfur region, systematically targeted for murder, rape, or displacement by government-backed Arab "Janjaweed" militias, simply because of their race. This is a genocide, taking place right now. We have the power to stop it. But action to date by the civilized world has been utterly insufficient.

We seem to have an obligation to protect if a dictator is going to rapidly kill many of his people on CNN. We do not seem to have the same obligation if he will kill his people slowly and not on CNN.

The Syrian security regime should know ... that despotic regimes and tyrants who committed massacres against humanity were pursued, prosecuted and collapsed.

The Syrian people deserve much more than complicit silence, or timid criticism from those who have failed to refer the regime to the International Criminal Court despite acknowledgement if its crimes.

We should not have attacked Iraq without the okay of the United Nations. Now we have to live with that mistake. We're living with it, and too many of our guys are dying with it.

There is a terrible price the U. S. Government must pay when it associates itself … intimately with a repressive regime.

…allies such as Bahrain are liable to use their American made weapons against their own people.

They want to bring the revolution down. One of the important means they have employed has been these economic sanctions. They say that the sanctions are not targeting the Iranian people, but they are lying! The sanctions are meant to cripple the Iranian nation…. They want to sever the ties between the people and the Islamic Republican system.

I am in firm opposition to the Junta and Ukrainian Nazism that are annihilating peaceful civilians.

When Saddam Hussein militarily attacked Iran, the rest of the countries all supported him. And at that time, there were mass executions in Iraq. In order to continue to support Saddam Hussein, they issued a lot of reports about human-rights abuse in Iran. And they put Iran in the black list of human-rights violators. But at the same time they took Iraq off the black list.

Obama has no way to conceal that Osama was executed in front of his children and wives, who are now under the custody of the authorities of Pakistan, a Muslim country of almost 200 million inhabitants, whose laws have been violated, its national dignity offended, and its religious traditions desecrated.