“The prince who permits his subjects to see the distinction between his stated target and the actual destruction forfeits their fear and secures only their hatred.”

“State violence, once unleashed against the 'other,' inevitably finds its true mass in the marketplace where the people live.”

“A 'precision airstrike' on a market is like a 'precision surgery' with a sledgehammer - the only thing you're sure to hit is the patient.”

“The official report speaks of a target, but the ground holds only cabbages, sandals, and the particular stillness of a body that was bargaining for yams a moment before.”

“A military that cannot distinguish a militant from a merchant in its own sovereign territory has designed a system that manufactures insurgents faster than it can eliminate them.”

“Fear of the hidden enemy creates a greater, more visible terror, as atoms of shrapnel obey the same blind physics whether they strike a fighter or a child.”

“If your equation for security requires the variable of two hundred civilian deaths, you have not solved the problem; you have merely redefined catastrophe as a coefficient.”

“There's a mighty comforting distance between the fellow who calls it 'precision' from his desk and the folks who have to sort the pieces.”

“When the state's protection becomes indistinguishable from its most lethal violence, the covenant is broken, and the people are left with only the right of the grievously wounded to ask why.”

“Count the names, list the stalls, note the ages of the dead, and the military's single 'precision' claim dissolves into two hundred separate facts of indiscriminate slaughter.”

“These children blown apart in the market, weren't they the nation's own, deserving of its shield rather than its fire?”