Civilians Quotes & Sayings

We are at war to liberate Iraq, to protect the people of the United States and other countries from the devastating impact of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction being used by terrorists or the Iraqi government to kill thousands of innocent civilians. — Paul Cellucci

A favorite Palestinian tactic was to set up a couple of cannons or rocket launchers in a Christian village, fire a few rounds into Israel, and then quickly withdraw, knowing that Israel's return fire would fall on innocent Christian civilians. — Brigitte Gabriel

The more vulgar apologists for U.S. and Israeli crimes solemnly explain that, while Arabs purposely kill civilians, the U.S. and Israel, being democratic societies, do not intend to do so. Their — Noam Chomsky

The gremlin mob turned on Root, and when they saw the triple-barreled blaster on his hip, they kept right on turning. Root grabbed the microphone from behind the desk, and hauled it out to the extent of its cable. "Now hear this," he growled, his gravelly tones echoing around the terminal. "This is Commander Root of the LEP. We have a serious situation above ground, and I would appreciate cooperation from all you civilians. First, I would like you all to stop your yapping so I can hear myself think!" Root paused to make certain his wishes were being respected. They were. "Secondly, I would like every single one of you, including those squawling infants, to sit down on the courtesy benches until I have gone on my way. Then you can get back to griping or stuffing your faces. Or whatever else it is civilians do." No one had ever accused Root of political correctness. No one was ever likely to either. — Eoin Colfer

I WILL FOLLOW ANYONE
AND THANK EVERYONE
WHO TRIES TO MAKE
A DIFFERENCE IN THE LIVES
OF VULNERABLE CIVILIANS — Widad Akreyi

To be a good reporter, writing about war, you have to write about the people. It's not about the tanks or the RPGs or military strategy. It's always about the effect war has on civilians, on society, and how it disrupts and destroys lives. — Janine Di Giovanni

Muslims are the main victims of Islamist inspired terrorism around the globe. ISIS have and other Islamist extremism group have killed thousands of Muslims across the middle east, including some Sunnis who have refused to pledge loyalty. Its members have executed imams who have denounced their activities. Their sectarianism has even spawned deadly attacks on civilians simply because they are shi'i. These extremists have determinedly created divisions to wipe out the 'grey zone' of reason and tolerance. They have conflated religion and politics and thereby poisoned Islam. — Tony McMahon

If you shell a military base and happen to kill civilians, you have not committed a war crime; if you deliberately target cities and towns, you have. — Sebastian Junger

After the war, they took Army dogs and rehabilitated them for civilian life. But they turned soldiers into civilians immediately, and let em sink or swim. — Audie Murphy

We checked carefully the international law - what does a nation do when terrorists are using civilians to defend their life, as a shelter. And they say you do not have a choice. — Shimon Peres

Needless to say, this would be an unthinkable crime - as it would kill tens of millions of innocent civilians in a single day - but it may be the only course of action available to us, given what Islamists believe — Sam Harris

Yet the civilians have always respected the natural right of a citizen to dispose of his life ... — Edward Gibbon

We were still looking upon war in the light of Victorian and previous wars," Morton wrote later, adding that he and his brother had failed to appreciate that the "nature and method of war had changed for all time in August 1914 and that no war in the future would exclude anybody, civilians, men, women or children. — Erik Larson

The bombing of helpless and unprotected civilians is a strategy which has aroused the horror of all mankind. I recall with pride that the United States consistently has taken the lead in urging that this inhuman practice be prohibited. — William H. Willimon

If Saddam's regime and survival are threatened [by invasion], he will have nothing to lose, and may use everything at his disposal ... If weapons of mass destruction land on Israeli soil, killing innocent civilians, the experts I have consulted believe Israel will retaliate, and possibly with nuclear weapons ... Nor can we rule out the possibility that Saddam would assault American forces with chemical or biological weapons. — Edward Kennedy

Israel does not target civilians. It targets the terrorists. — Benjamin Netanyahu

Even during the years of the Cold War, the intense confrontation between the Soviet Union and the United States, we always avoided any direct clash between our civilians and, most certainly, between our military. — Vladimir Putin

Ranger is one of the few civilians in Trenton with a permit to carry concealed. He owns office buildings in Boston, has a daughter in Florida by a failed marriage, has worked worldwide as a mercenary, and has a moral code that isn't entirely in sync with our legal system. I have no idea who the heck he is . . . but I like him. — Janet Evanovich

The institutions founded 'to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war' have failed. Since the end of WW2, some thirty million people have been killed in armed conflict. Most of them were civilians. — George Monbiot

The rulling to kill the Americans and their allies - civilians and military - is an individual duty for every Muslim who can do it in anyh country in which it is possible to do it ... to comply iwth God's order to kill the Americnns and plunder their money wherever and whenever they find it. We also call on Muslim ulema, leaders, youths, and soldiers to launch the raid on Satan's U.S. troops and the devil's supporters allying with them ... — Osama Bin Laden

Peace is a fulltime job. It's protecting civilians, overseeing elections, and disarming ex-combatants. Peace, like war, must be waged. — George Clooney

Peace is not just a colored ribbon. It's more than a wristband or a t-shirt. It's not just a donation or a 5 K race. It's not just a folk song, or a white dove. And peace is certainly more than a celebrity endorsement. Peace is a fulltime job. It's protecting civilians, overseeing elections, and disarming ex-combatants. The UN has over 100,000 Peacekeepers on the ground, in places others can't or won't go, doing things others can't or won't do. Peace, like war, must be waged. — George Clooney

Wanton killing of innocent civilians is terrorism, not a war against terrorism. — Noam Chomsky

And in a nasty war, where's the best place to be? Apart from on the moon, o' course? No one?"
Slowly, Jade raised a hand.
"Go on, then," said the sergeant.
"In the army, sarge," said the troll. "'cos ... " She began to count on her fingers. "One, you got weapons an' armour an' dat. Two, you are surrounded by other armed men. Er ... Many, youse gettin' paid and gettin' better grub than the people in Civilian Street. Er ... Lots, if'n you gives up, you getting taken pris'ner and dere's rules about that like Not Kicking Pris'ners Inna Head and stuff, 'cos if you kick their pris'ners inna head they'll kick your pris'ners inna head so dat's, like, you're kickin' your own head, but dere's no rule say you can't kick enemy civilians inna head. There's other stuff too, but I ran outa numbers. — Terry Pratchett

This war ends, then so do the taxpayer-funded contracts, the drumbeats in the media, the nice Combatant faces, and the patriotic cause to lull the civilians and shame the dissenters. The other thing that comes to an end is all the justification for why this country's run the way it is. People will wonder why their paychecks are still getting halved to pay off the men who own their utility companies, their roads, their national parks. They'll wonder why they've got to work eighty-hour weeks to support the folks who took their houses and destroyed the middle-class jobs. There's not going to be an enemy to point a finger at anymore. People will see the real problem. — S.J. Kincaid

I investigated reported Japanese atrocities committed by the Japanese Army in Nanking and elsewhere. Verbal accounts of reliable eyewitnesses and letters from individuals whose credibility is beyond question afford convincing proof that the Japanese Army behaved and is continuing to behave in a fashion reminiscent of Attila and his Huns. Not less than 300,000 Chinese civilians were slaughtered, many in cold blood. — Koki Hirota

When things did go wrong for the IRA, when civilians were killed, I tried to put it in context, not defend it. — Peter T. King

I don't believe that humans can be reduced to homo economicus, but as a group, government officials are remarkably sensitive to financial, political, and reputational costs. Thus, when new technologies appear to reduce the costs of using lethal force, their threshold for deciding to use lethal force correspondingly drops.
If killing a suspected terrorist in Yemen or Somalia or Libya will endanger expensive manned aircraft, the lives of U.S. troops, and/or the lives of many innocent civilians, officials will reserve such killings for situations of extreme urgency and gravity (stopping another 9/11, getting Osama bin Laden). But if all that appears to be at risk is a an easily replaceable drone, officials will be tempted to use lethal force more and more casually. — Rosa Brooks

Truly intelligent beings do not drop bombs on innocent civilians. — Hiroshi Yamamoto

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. — Mohamed ElBaradei

With the indiscriminate nature of modern military technology (no such thing as a "smart bomb," it turns out) all wars are wars against civilians, and are therefore inherently immoral. This is true even when a war is considered "just," because it is fought against a tyrant, against an aggressor, to correct a stolen boundary. — Howard Zinn

It's not the generals, it's the civilians who authorise and organise the worst war crimes. — Noam Chomsky

They couldn't very well bag everyone wearing a cowboy hat. This was Texas, which meant there'd be plenty of hats, and besides, there was such a thing as civil rights ... and, worse, civilians with camera phones. — J. Fally

U.S. Government propaganda tries to give the impression that aerial bombardment achieves near-surgical accuracy, so that military targets can be destroyed with minimal effect on civilians. Technical documents give a different picture. — Noam Chomsky

In 30 minutes, at high noon, more than 200 civilians are killed. Zionism carries out a massacre in the city of Lydda. — Ari Shavit

A Guardian investigation concluded that between 10,000 and 20,000 people died as an 'indirect' result of the US bombing, that is, through hunger, cold and disease as people were forced to flee the massive aerial assault. An estimate by Professor Marc Herold of the University of New Hampshire, suggests that between 3,125 and 3,620 Afghan civilians were killed by US bombing up to July 2002.3 — Mark Curtis

Fourth, we will continue providing humanitarian assistance to innocent civilians who have been displaced by this terrorist organization. This includes Sunni and Shia Muslims who are at grave risk, as well as tens of thousands of Christians and other religious minorities. We cannot allow these communities to be driven from their ancient homelands. — Barack Obama

Civilians who volunteer generally wish to escape, not to share, privatizations worse than their own. — Barbara W. Tuchman

These are not soldiers, these are men. They are notadventurers or warriors, designed for human butchery - as butchers or cattle. They are the ploughmen or workers that one recognizes even in their uniforms. They are uprooted civilians. They are ready, waiting for the signal for death or murder, but when you examine their faces between the vertical ranks of bayonets, they are nothing but men. — Henri Barbusse

It is a rule of international law that weapons and methods of warfare which do not discriminate between combatants and civilians should never be used. — Sean MacBride

Lowther looked shocked. "That would mean it's our policy to kill civilians." "Exactly." "But the government assures us - " "The government lies," Boy said. "And the bomber crews know it. Many of them don't give a damn, of course, but some feel bad. They believe that if we're doing the right thing, then we should say so, and if we're doing the wrong thing we should stop. — Ken Follett

When we helped prevent the massacre of civilians trapped on a distant mountain, here's what one of them said: "We owe our American friends our lives. Our children will always remember that there was someone who felt our struggle and made a long journey to protect innocent people." That is the difference we make in the world. — Barack Obama

Do we really think that the United States will have the protection of innocent Afghans in mind if it rains terror down on the Afghan infrastructure? We are supposedly fighting them because they immorally killed innocent civilians. That made them evil. If we do the same, are we any less immoral? — George Lakoff

Do not forget that the armed forces are the servants of the people. You do not make national policy; it is we, the civilians, who decide these issues and it is your duty to carry out these tasks with which you are entrusted. — Muhammad Ali Jinnah

Any action taken will be against the terrorist network of Bin Laden ... As for the Taleban, they can surrender the terrorists or face the consequences - and again in any action the aim will be to eliminate their military hardware, cut off their finances, disrupt their supplies, target their troops, not civilians. — Tony Blair

There is no moral equivalency between those who would kill using children, innocent civilians, children and adults, in their homes and in their places of worship, to that of a government that is seeking those terrorists before they can engage in that awful activity. — George Pataki

Torturing innocents, murdering civilians and destroying public property; they are all the gifts we have been given by religion. — M.F. Moonzajer

'Civilians' is a term I love. It's what Elizabeth Hurley used to describe people who weren't on TV. — Alan Carr

As to those in the World Trade Center ... Let's get a grip here, shall we? True enough, they were civilians of a sort. But innocent? Gimme a break ... If there was a better, more effective, or in fact any other way of visiting some penalty befitting their participation upon the little Eichmanns inhabiting the sterile sanctuary of the twin towers, I'd really be interested in hearing about it. — Ward Churchill

We know broadly from research is that religiosity does not correlate with sympathy for terrorism. It's actually quite the opposite. The more religious someone is, the more often they go to the mosque, the more likely they are to actually reject attacks on civilians. — Chuck Todd

Either that information was not believed or inexplicably never passed on to the regional military command. When the attack finally came, Vienamese civilians were defenseless. — Nayan Chanda

If the Palestinian people really wish to decide that they will battle to the very end to prevent partition or annexation of even an inch of their ancestral soil, then I have to concede that that is their right. I even think that a sixty-year rather botched experiment in marginal quasi-statehood is something that the Jewish people could consider abandoning. It represents barely an instant in our drawn-out and arduous history, and it's already been agreed even by the heirs of Ze'ev Jabotinsky that the whole scheme is unrealizable in 'Judaea and Samaria,' let alone in Gaza or Sinai. But it's flat-out intolerable to be solicited to endorse a side-by-side Palestinian homeland and then to discover that there are sinuous two-faced apologists explaining away the suicide-murder of Jewish civilians in Tel Aviv, a city which would be part of a Jewish state or community under any conceivable 'solution.' There's that word again ... — Christopher Hitchens

who can dare claim to believe in God when they slaughter civilians merely to gain a slight advantage? — Christopher G. Nuttall

They were civilians. Killing them was, at the very least, bad form. But then Julie whispered in the back of his mind, No one here is innocent, and he had to agree. — James S.A. Corey

But people turn on their televisions. They turn on their televisions and they see what's happening in Iraq. The American people are not stupid. And the one thing they understand, they understand how incredibly mismanaged and bungled this war has been by the civilians in this administration. And - I mean, you can't paper over that, any more than you can paper over Katrina. — Joe Biden

I just want to say something. 655,000 Iraqi civilians are dead. Who are the terrorists? — Rosie O'Donnell

9:37, the west wall of the Pentagon was hit by hijacked American Airlines Flight 77, a Boeing 757. The crash caused immediate and catastrophic damage. All 64 people aboard the airliner were killed,as were 125 people inside the Pentagon (70 civilians and 55 military service members). One hundred six people were seriously injured and transported to area hospitals.192 While no emergency response is flawless, the response to the 9/11 terror= ist attack on the Pentagon was mainly a success for three reasons:first,the strong professional relationships and trust established among emergency responders; second, the adoption of the Incident Command System; and third, the pursuit of a regional approach to response. Many fire and police agencies that responded had extensive — Anonymous

When civilians are not asked to pay any price, it's easy to be at war - not just to intervene in a foreign land in the first place, but to keep on fighting there. The justifications for staying at war don't have to be particularly rational or cogently argued when so few Americans are making the sacrifice that it takes to stay. — Rachel Maddow

Human beings around the world have to be taught to go, 'Tamil equals Tamil civilians first, and the Tamil Tiger is a separate thing.' And both of those groups are different. It's like a square and a circle. — M.I.A.

YOU DEMAND SALVATION EVEN AS YOU STEAL FROM THE COLLECTION PLATE.
YOU SEND FOOD TO THE REFUGEES, AND THEN YOU DON'T ALLOW THE DELIVERY TRUCKS THROUGH THE WARZONES. THE FOOD WILL SPOIL , THE SUPPLIES WILL BE SOLD BY THE VICTORS . THE CIVILIANS WILL STARVE AND SICKEN AND EVENTUALLY DIE.
IT IS THE WAY OF THINGS. THEY WILL ALL DIE, WHETHER FROM THE BRUTAL SAVAGERY THAT IS UNIQUE TO MAN OR FROM THE ABUNDANCE OF DISEASE OR FROM THE SCARCITY OF SUSTENANCE. — Jackie Morse Kessler

The Goths didn't destroy Rome, nor did they massacre the population. On the contrary, the Barbarians took particular care to provide safe-houses for civilians and not to harm public buildings. — Terry Jones

The United States that has been involved first in the Gulf War and then in the tremendously damaging sanctions against Iraqi civilians. The United States that is the supporter of Israel against the Palestinians. — Edward Said

Iraq is a strange country. Where else can American civilians like me be protected by terrorist human shields? — Michael Totten

When I was developing the [Daredevil] idea, we were really doing something closer to what was in the comic book. By that, I mean in terms of civilians in the street knew that superpowers were an everyday matter of fact. When it finally ended up at Netflix, they really decided to land it in the Marvel Universe that exists in the cinematic universe. That changes the story entirely. It was no longer about the other, which is what that metaphor was. It's really more about the character herself, which I love. — Melissa Rosenberg

Evacuation on September 11. It was aided greatly by changes made by the Port Authority in response to the 1993 bomb= ing and by the training of both Port Authority personnel and civilians after that time. Stairwells remained lit near — Anonymous

Twenty-first century war adds new risks: more and more often there are no front lines, no central command, no rules of engagement - only a chaotic collision of politics, power, faith and bloodlust. Victims are as likely to be civilians as soldiers. — Nancy Gibbs

There are no innocent civilians, so it doesn't bother me so much to be killing innocent bystanders. — Curtis LeMay

Some of my best sources are ex-policemen, just to get a feeling of what it's like to be one. And it's quite different from being a civilian - except, of course, that I believe that policemen are just special sorts of civilians. Things like how hard it is to hold someone that doesn't want to be held. This is the kind of thing that is worth knowing. — Terry Pratchett

These civilians are discovering that their place in the world is smaller than they imagined. They do not matter. In war, men lose what makes them great. Their creativity. Their wisdom. Their joy. All that's left is their utility. War is not monstrous for making corpses of men so much as it is for making machines of them. And woe to those who have no use in war except to feed the machines. The — Pierce Brown

I try to express with the camera what the story is, to get to the heart of the story with picture. In battle I look at things first in terms of people, second in terms of strategies or casualties ... To tell a story, you don't photograph one hundred dead civilians to prove there were one hundred dead civilians. You photograph one dead civilian with an expression on his face that says, This is what it's like if you're a dead civilian in Vietnam. — Horst Faas

A common strand appeared to unite these conflicts, and that was the advancement of a small coterie's concept of American interests in the guise of the fight against terrorism, which was defined to refer only to the organized and politically motivated killing of civilians by killers not wearing the uniforms of soldiers. I recognized that if this was to be the single most important priority of our species, then the lives of those of us who lived in lands in which such killers also lived had no meaning except as collateral damage. This, I reasoned, was why America felt justified in bringing so many deaths to Afghanistan and Iraq, and why America felt justified in risking so many more deaths by tacitly using India to pressure Pakistan. — Mohsin Hamid

A system in which legal police shootings of unarmed civilians are a common occurrence is a system that has some serious flaws. In this case, the drawback is a straightforward consequence of America's approach to firearms. A well-armed citizenry required an even-better-armed constabulary. Widespread gun ownership creates a systematic climate of fear on the part of the police. The result is a quantity of police shootings that, regardless of the facts of any particular case, is just staggeringly high. Young black men, in particular, are paying the price for America's gun culture. — Matthew Yglesias

There are hundreds of electromagnetic cases where spacecraft have been observed by police, military personnel and civilians to affect car engines, radios and other electric devices. — Steven M. Greer

[He] had seen firsthand the horrific results of appeasement. It was a path chosen by feebleminded people who were morally incapable of confronting evil. He saw many parallels between the Nazis, the communists, and these jihadists. They were all sociopaths at heart
obsessed with their own tribal desires and utterly incapable of conferring justice or compassion on those outside the tribe. If you were not one of them, you were a lesser human, and thus deserved to be treated in any way they saw fit. And if that meant blowing up airliners and buses full of innocent civilians, then so be it. — Vince Flynn

Until 1943, when Stalingrad and bombing began to change everything, most German civilians save those who lost loved ones found the conflict a numbing presence rather than a trauma. — Max Hastings

These mercenaries and hirelings kidnapped civilians in the Al-Faw Peninsula so that they might claim that they captured Iraqi soldiers. — Mohammed Saeed Al-Sahaf

The longer the war drags on, more and more civilians are getting killed. — Sergey Akhromeyev

The war against terrorism should not be used to interfere with an independent, sovereign state. We need to identify concrete terrorist targets and do no harm to civilians. — Nong Duc Manh

Islamic law is clearly against terrorism, against any kind of deliberate killing of civilians or similar 'collateral damage.' — Feisal Abdul Rauf

How is it that I could run into a gunfight against overwhelming odds and put myself between bullets and civilians, but I couldn't scrape together enough courage to speak to the one person who mattered the most to me? — Ilona Andrews

In Gaza, in August 2014, I spent ten days in a community being systematically destroyed by drone strikes, shelling and sniper fire. Fifteen hundred civilians were killed, one third of them children. In February 2015, I saw the US Congress give twenty-five standing ovations to the man who ordered the attacks. — Paul Mason

Maybe you didn't understand American foreign policy or why we were at war. Maybe you never will. But it doesn't matter. You held up your hand and said, "I'm willing to die for these worthless civilians. — Phil Klay

Protecting Afghan civilians is the cornerstone of our mission. — John R. Allen

At least 23,000 civilians have also died in the Iraqi killing field and the U.S. is stuck in a quagmire. — Charles B. Rangel

Just as in policing there is an emphasis on civilians to help with paperwork, we must free up trained and experienced social workers to focus on children, not bureaucracy. — Andy Sawford

But that could not have been the main cause of the carnage, because in subsequent centuries the technology kept getting deadlier while the death toll came back to earth. Luard singles out religious passion as the cause: It was above all the extension of warfare to civilians, who (especially if they worshipped the wrong god) were frequently regarded as expendable, which now increased the brutality of war and the level of casualties. Appalling bloodshed could be attributed to divine wrath. The duke of Alva had the entire male population of Naarden killed after its capture (1572), regarding this as a judgement of God for their hard-necked obstinacy in resisting; just as Cromwell later, having allowed his troops to sack Drogheda with appalling bloodshed (1649), declared that this was a "righteous judgement of God." Thus by a cruel paradox those who fought in the name of their faith were often less likely than any to show humanity to their opponents in war. — Steven Pinker

Today's terrorists are pursuing a distinct route. They are increasingly attacking civilians in symbolic targets, such as those of economic importance, or venues of bustling life like public transportation or entertainment, like nightclubs. — Cliff Stearns

I could not make the war seem real for myself. Even though I had heard about the Nazi bombing of cities in Spain, I couldn't imagine an air attack on unarmed civilians. Remember, there were still horses on the roads of rural Germany at that time. Very few people understood what modern war would be like. — Edith Hahn Beer

Every day, police officers see the hairy, smelly underbelly of humanity, the most depraved and evil shit human beings are capable of, shit civilians thankfully can't imagine. — Lisa Genova

Luis Moreno Ocampo, chief prosecutor of the international criminal court, wrote in 2006: International humanitarian law and the Rome statute permit belligerents to carry out proportionate attacks against military objectives, even when it is known that some civilian deaths or injuries will occur. A crime occurs if there is an intentional attack directed against civilians (principle of distinction) ... or an attack is launched on a military objective in the knowledge that the incidental civilian injuries would be clearly excessive in relation to the anticipated military advantage (principle of proportionality). — Anonymous

An uncontrollable force at the other side of the border is attacking civilians," Numan Kurtulmus, a Turkish deputy prime minister, said of the Islamic State group. — Anonymous

How can you claim infallibility and claim that in these 114 [drone] strikes there was just one mistake
one person killed that was a civilian
and at the same time say, 'Well, we don't really know how many people were killed or who they were, but we know they weren't civilians'? I don't know how you can do that. — Richard Engel

We feel sorry for the poor people who died,' one soldier said. 'But how are we to know who is a terrorist and who isn't?' said another. 'They mingle with the people, with the civilians, and we cannot question each one of them individually. It is either them or ourselves. But in war who has time for pity? We see our men blown up in landmines. The flesh has to be scraped off the Claymores. They are shot by snipers. Reprisals and massacres take place - are these happenings not inevitable in a time of war? Killings will go on. The civilians will always suffer. — Jean Arasanayagam

Fighting Maoism isn't like fighting an enemy across the border. They are civilians. The military and paramilitary have been trained to fight the enemy, but these are tribals dwelling in forests. They are also our citizens, whom we have ill-treated. — Kishore Chandra Deo

Self-important western journalists who'd given up their sacred trust to become cheerleaders for trendy causes, the way communist journalists had once been cheerleaders for the government ... They were depriving the free world of its most valuable weapon in condemning and exposing the worst human scourge since Nazism: the targeting and murder of civilians to achieve political and religious ends. — Naomi Ragen

We civilians defend our own right to free speech. The military in Iraq does not defend our right to free speech. — Medea Benjamin

We are in control, they are in a state of hysteria. Losers, they think that by killing civilians and trying to distort the feelings of the people they will win. I think they will not win, those bastards. — Mohammed Saeed Al-Sahaf

We are absolutely right to condemn the suicide bomber's targeting of innocent civilians and mourn his victims. But as we have seen, in war the state also targets such victims; during the 20th century, the rate of civilian deaths rose sharply and now stands at 90 percent. In the West we solemnize the deaths of our regular troops carefully and recurrently honor the memory of the soldier who dies do his country. Yet the civilian deaths we cause are rarely mentioned, and there has been no sustained outcry in the West against them. Suicide bombing shocks us to the core; but should it be more shocking than the deaths of thousands of children in their homelands every every year because of land mines? Or collateral damage in a drone strike? — Karen Armstrong

Flacks for both war-obsessed governments immediately blamed the other side for the deaths of the civilians. — Colman McCarthy

Yes and no. Because America has only about 1 percent of the population serving in the military, it is hard for many civilians to understand the sacrifices military families make. However, my experience is that after the Vietnam War, the public learned that they should support the military whether or not they support the war. You've seen that outpouring of support for the veterans of both Iraq and Afghanistan. — Steve Stivers