War & Peace Quote by Tom Lantos

“Stable,” “at peace,” “elusive”: Lantos stacks sober, almost bureaucratic words to smuggle in a hard accusation. The line reads like technocratic common sense, but its intent is corrective and political: stop pretending Iraq’s problems are merely a question of elections, speeches, or troop levels. If you want a state that doesn’t export chaos, you have to build the conditions that make ordinary life viable.

The subtext is aimed as much at Washington as at Baghdad. “Will remain elusive until we improve” quietly assigns responsibility to the “we” that helped shatter Iraq’s institutions and then argued about what “success” even meant. It also counters the perennial temptation of security-first policy. Lantos doesn’t say security is enough; he pairs it with “economic environment,” implying that insurgency and sectarian militias feed on joblessness, black markets, and the humiliation of state failure. Stability isn’t a moral prize; it’s an infrastructure project.

Context matters: Lantos, a Holocaust survivor turned long-serving U.S. congressman and human-rights hawk, often fused moral language with strategic realism. This sentence is the realist half. It nods to regional politics (“peace with its neighbors”) and treats Iraq not as an isolated experiment but as a node in a volatile neighborhood, where porous borders, proxies, and oil incentives make “internal” security a regional affair.

The rhetorical power is its conditional certainty: not “might” or “could,” but a flat prediction of failure unless policy expands beyond force to governance, services, and livelihoods. It’s a warning disguised as a planning memo.