Time & Perspective Quote by Condoleezza Rice

Urgency is doing a lot of political work here. Rice’s line is built to make delay itself sound like collaboration: if you ask for “more time,” you’re not just cautious or procedural, you’re actively “playing into the hands” of the villain. The phrase is classic prewar framing from the Bush administration era, when the debate wasn’t only about Iraq’s weapons claims but about who gets to define responsibility in a fog of disputed intelligence. By shifting the argument from evidence to tempo, Rice turns an empirical question (What is Iraq doing? What do inspectors find?) into a moral referendum on resolve.

The key move is the false binary: either “immediately comply” or you’re enabling Saddam. It compresses the spectrum of policy options - inspections, containment, multilateral pressure, strategic patience - into a single test of loyalty. “Calling for more time” becomes a tell, a symptom of weakness or naivete, rather than a reasonable demand for verification. That’s not an accident; it’s a rhetorical preemption of skepticism. If time is the enemy, then deliberation is suspect, and institutions designed to slow down war (the UN, inspectors, allied negotiations) can be portrayed as obstacles rather than safeguards.

The subtext is aimed less at Baghdad than at audiences at home and in allied capitals: stop hedging, stop asking questions, stop complicating the story. In that sense, the line isn’t about Saddam’s agency so much as disciplining everyone else’s.