War & Peace Quote by Charles Foster Bass

The line reads like a victory speech with a hangover already scheduled. Bass isn’t celebrating the “war on terrorism” so much as trying to discipline expectations around it: even if the mission succeeds, the payoff won’t be clean, immediate, or politically simple. That’s the specific intent. It’s a preemptive reframing of “winning” away from parades and toward governance, paperwork, and consequences.

The subtext is that terrorism is not a single enemy you defeat, but a moving target that expands the very machinery built to fight it. “Spreads and prolongs” signals mission creep without saying the phrase; it implies that the campaign’s scope is self-perpetuating, with new theaters, new rationales, new deadlines. Then comes the careful hedging: “fruits” promises benefit, but “tempered” lowers the temperature. He’s warning that success will generate second-order problems - unstable states, blowback, civil liberties tradeoffs, veterans’ care, budgetary drag, intelligence overreach - without naming any of them, because naming them would pick fights.

Context matters: as a U.S. politician speaking in the post-9/11 era, Bass is operating inside a rhetorical constraint. You can’t sound soft on terrorism, but you also can’t ignore the public’s growing fatigue with open-ended war. The sentence splits the difference. It endorses the moral clarity of ending a “threat,” while quietly admitting that the policy reality is a hydra: cut off one head, and the next set of problems demands attention, funding, and political cover. The genius - and the tell - is that it prepares voters to accept messy outcomes as the price of progress.