Preemptive Strikes Quotes

I think carpet bombing is an absolutely tremendous idea if the enemy accommodates you by laying himself out like a carpet in the middle of the desert without any civilians or infrastructure around him. Sadly, the Islamic State has learned that that is a losing proposition and does not accommodate us in that way.

Renditions before and since 9/11 share some basic features. They have been conducted lawfully, responsibly and with a clear and single purpose: Get terrorists off the street and gain intelligence on those still at large. Our detention and interrogation programs flow from the same inescapable logic.

For eight years, you had the Bush administration with a very interventionist policy, driving into world affairs, driving primarily into the Islamic world, army first or fist first.

Regardless of moral considerations, assassination is a wrongheaded tool for a great power, because small powers can use it equally if not more effectively.

The United States does not view our authority to use military force against Al Qaeda as being restricted solely to 'hot' battlefields like Afghanistan.

Blowing terrorists to smithereens is gratifying.

Democrats always assure us that deterrence will work, but when the time comes to deter, they're against it.

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.

Can a nation use the methods of terrorism? Can it harm innocent civilians in the process? What are the costs? Where is the line?

From the very beginning, the American republic has never shrunk from foreign wars …. There has scarcely been a year since its founding that American soldiers haven’t been overseas … American foreign policy largely consists of doctrines about when and where to intervene in other people’s countries.

It kind of scares me, the notion that we're going to be injecting ourselves into other countries' affairs when they're not posing a threat to our security. I wouldn't be telling Israel what to do.

The only moral question with suicide bombing is who the target is. And in that sense, the suicide bomber is no different from the stealth bomber or the cruise missile. If it is targeted at civilian people, then it is morally wrong, whether done by Bush, Blair, or a suicide bomber.

The 'war on terror' has created a culture of fear in America.

I think when the president of the United States calls for military action, he should do it for a united people, especially when the methods have been so cruel, so explicitly directed at Americans.

American foreign policy had still not recovered from its victory over communism when George W. Bush and Condoleezza Rice took over at the White House in 2001.

I am not a 'defender' of the September 11 attacks, but simply pointing out that if U.S. foreign policy results in massive death and destruction abroad, we cannot feign innocence when some of that destruction is returned.

We stand a chance of getting a president who has probably killed more people before he gets into office than any president in the history of the United States.

Few people know that President Obama has used drone attacks many times more than Bush ever did. Obama's off the charts in terms of drone attack.

You should never take military intervention off the table. When you do so, you give an out to a rogue nation or rogue actors.

… civilian casualties [with drone attacks] have proved formidable. Haphazard intelligence has often been to blame, as earn local tipsters have provided the United States with false information in order to take out innocent rivals.

Who cares if virtually the entire world views Obama's drone attacks as unjustified and wrong? Who cares if the Muslim world continues to seethe with anti-American animus as a result of this aggression? Empires do what they want.

Abroad, our most important policy is to support our troops and continue forward-thinking foreign policy in the war on terror - keeping our enemies on the run and hitting them before they hit us.

If the innocent people who died in the attack on Afghanistan, and those who have been dying from lack of food and medical care in Iraq, are considered collaterals, are not the 3,000 who died in New York and the 200 in Bali also just collaterals, whose deaths are necessary for the operations to succeed?

It isn't those of us who oppose American aggression in the Muslim world who need manipulative, exploitative reminders about 9/11; it's those who cheer for these policies who are making a follow-up attack ever more likely.

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.