"As far as Iraq is concerned, let's not forget what the UNSCR is about, that the main consideration in Iraq is that there is a leader who has been developing weapons of mass destruction, and has been violating UN resolutions for over a decade"
About this Quote
The sentence is engineered to compress a messy, morally ambiguous policy debate into a single clean storyline: enforcement. Evans plants the listener inside an already-set frame - the UNSCR (UN Security Council Resolution) exists for one reason, and that reason is Iraq. By saying "let's not forget", he implies selective amnesia in the public sphere, positioning dissent as forgetfulness rather than disagreement. It's a neat rhetorical move: it turns argument into remediation, as if the administration is simply restoring the obvious.
The phrase "main consideration" does heavy lifting. It preemptively downgrades other considerations - civilian cost, regional blowback, intelligence uncertainty, the politics of inspections - into distractions. Then comes the double-charge: "developing weapons of mass destruction" and "violating UN resolutions for over a decade". One is an immediate fear trigger; the other is a patience narrative. Together they justify urgency while claiming long-suffering restraint, suggesting action isn't impulsive but overdue.
Context matters: this is the post-9/11 era, when WMD became a kind of political shorthand for catastrophic risk, and UN legitimacy was both a diplomatic instrument and a domestic talking point. Evans's intent is not to litigate evidence but to stabilize a moral hierarchy: the leader is the problem; the UN has already judged; history has already granted enough time. The subtext is a permission structure for force, built from institutional language that sounds procedural even as it primes escalation.
The phrase "main consideration" does heavy lifting. It preemptively downgrades other considerations - civilian cost, regional blowback, intelligence uncertainty, the politics of inspections - into distractions. Then comes the double-charge: "developing weapons of mass destruction" and "violating UN resolutions for over a decade". One is an immediate fear trigger; the other is a patience narrative. Together they justify urgency while claiming long-suffering restraint, suggesting action isn't impulsive but overdue.
Context matters: this is the post-9/11 era, when WMD became a kind of political shorthand for catastrophic risk, and UN legitimacy was both a diplomatic instrument and a domestic talking point. Evans's intent is not to litigate evidence but to stabilize a moral hierarchy: the leader is the problem; the UN has already judged; history has already granted enough time. The subtext is a permission structure for force, built from institutional language that sounds procedural even as it primes escalation.
Quote Details
| Topic | War |
|---|
More Quotes by Donald
Add to List
