Unintended Victims Quotes

War hath no fury like a noncombatant.

America has this fascination with glorifying the villain and not talking about the trials and tribulations. We tell the story of the successful villain a lot of times, but we don't tell the story of the people who don't come out so successful, and we don't tell the story of all the bystanders of that choice.

… 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.

Every scandal has its road kill: the pedestrians who stumble into the headlights of the oncoming 18-wheeler.

I lament that two or three women and children were killed by accident.

In every war, innocent people die.

Land mines distinguish themselves because once they have been sown, once the soldier walks away from the weapon, the land mine cannot tell the difference between a soldier or a civilian---a woman, a child, a grandmother going out to collect firewood to make the family meal. The crux of the problem is that while the use of the weapon might be militarily justifiable during the day of the battle, or even the two weeks of the battle, or maybe even the two months of the battle, once peace is declared the land mine does not recognize that peace. The land mine is eternally prepared to take victims. In common parlance, it is the perfect soldier, the eternal sentry. The war ends; the land mine goes on killing.

Landmines are different from other conventional weapons. When a war is over, the landmines stay in the ground and continue to kill - for decades.

The violence of war admits no distinction; the lance, that is lifted at guilt and power, will sometimes fall on innocence and gentleness.

Every shot that kills ricochets.

Carl Armstrong was one of those people in the anti-war years who had been so convinced of the righteousness of their cause that he and some friends decided they would blow up a building at the University of Wisconsin, in which they said research was being done to help the war against the Vietnamese. What they blew up at three or four in the morning was a young scientist, who was married and had a couple of kids, who wasn't working on war stuff at all. And he was killed.

Because when you kill 300 people, 400 people, who have nothing to do with the provocations Hezbollah staged, but you do it in effect deliberately by being indifferent to the scale of collateral damage, you're killing hostages in the hope of intimidating those that you want to intimidate. And more likely than not you will not intimidate them. You'll simply outrage them and make them into permanent enemies with the number of such enemies increasing.