Politics & Power Quote by John Conyers

Conyers is doing something quietly devastating here: he’s not arguing about troop levels or timelines, he’s arguing about legitimacy. By anchoring his claim in “recent opinion polls,” he borrows the language of technocratic neutrality, then uses it to spotlight a political reality Washington preferred to treat as a PR problem. The sentence is built to trap the reader in an uncomfortable double bind. If Iraqis think the U.S. won’t leave, the occupation has already failed at the most basic strategic task: being seen as temporary, invited, and conditional. If they think the U.S. would stay “even if asked” to go, the project stops looking like partnership and starts reading like possession.

The subtext is aimed less at Baghdad than at Congress and the American public. Conyers, a long-serving House Democrat and frequent critic of executive war-making, is implicitly indicting the idea that U.S. power can manufacture consent after the fact. He’s also warning about the downstream costs of perceived permanence: insurgency recruitment, fractured governance, and the corrosion of any “liberation” narrative into the older, uglier vocabulary of empire.

Context matters: mid-2000s Iraq was a theater where “we’re leaving soon” was endlessly promised while bases expanded and benchmarks slipped. Conyers leverages Iraqi perception as the metric that can’t be spun away. The intent isn’t merely to criticize policy; it’s to puncture the comforting assumption that intentions matter more than how they’re received. In counterinsurgency, perception isn’t a sideshow. It’s the battlefield.