Denis Diderot Quotes
It is raining bombs on the house of the Lord. I go in fear and trembling lest one of these terrible bombers gets into difficulties.
Diderot, Denis. Lettres à Sophie Volland, 28 Juillet 1762. Oeuvres complètes de Diderot, edited by J. Assézat and M. Tourneux, Vol. 19, Garnier Frères, 1876, p. 110.
The threat was if Pakistan did not cooperate with the United States after the September 11 attack. Pakistan was full of Islamic fundamentalists with strong ties to the Taliban and other terroristsw. Pakistan did cooperate as a government but the Musharraf government itself was under attack by the Islamic Fundamentalists who tried to assassinate Musharraf a number of times. Armitage has denied that he said such a thing, but he does admit a conversation where he told them that “they were with us or against us.”
Cunningham was part of an American Diplomatic Delegation negotiating with the Vietnamese. He had been an Naval Ace Fighter Pilot during the Vietnam War. He was notorious for his lack of tact.
O’Neil was one of the great ironies of the War on Terror. For years before 9-11 he had determined that al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden where major threats to America. However, the then Director of the FBI Louis Freeh had repeatedly told the White House and the national Security Council that they were not a major threat. O’Neil kept insisting that more attention be paid to al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden and was a very aggressive personality so much that his supervisors drove him out of the FBI. He then took the job of the Director of Security of the World Trade Center where he continued to warn about al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden. He was killed in the 9-11 attack when his predictions came true. The O’Neil case is yet another example of the people who were the most right in our intelligence apparatus were isolated or pushed out if they tried to command the attention of the nation’s policy makers.
The culture of Iraq and the Desert tribes made raiding and looting of other villages or travelers or caravans a way of life. The British occupiers were determined to put an end to it and Harris, a young officer, developed the retaliation of bombing the village of the raiders and their warlords. This appears to be the beginning of destroying of houses in the Middle East as a method of retaliation and punishment which would be adopted so well by the Israelis as a humane method and they often quoted Harris saying: “we put them to the maximum amount of inconvenience, without physical hurt, and they soon stopped their raiding and looting.”
Denis Diderot was a French philosopher, art critic, and writer, best known for serving as co-founder, chief editor, and contributor to the Encyclopédie along with Jean le Rond d'Alembert. He was a prominent figure during the Age of Enlightenment.
