"Before and during the first phase of the war his administration repeatedly maligned the UN but now, that Iraq has turned into a quagmire, it is asking the UN for help"
About this Quote
The line lands like a procedural indictment: not of a single decision, but of a governing reflex to treat institutions as disposable until reality makes them indispensable. Schuyler’s target is the performative contempt leaders show for multilateral bodies when those bodies constrain freedom of action, followed by a sudden rediscovery of their value when costs spike. “Maligned” does heavy work here, implying not mere disagreement with the UN but a deliberate effort to delegitimize it in public, to preempt criticism and rally a domestic audience around sovereignty and strength. The pivot word “but” exposes the tell: principle wasn’t guiding policy; convenience was.
“Quagmire” is the moral accelerant. It doesn’t just mean a difficult war. It’s a metaphor for strategic overreach that sucks in credibility, money, and lives while offering no clean exit. Once that framing takes hold, asking the UN for help reads less like diplomacy than damage control - an attempt to outsource legitimacy and share the burden after insisting you didn’t need either.
The subtext is as much about narrative management as foreign policy. First, the administration builds a story where international oversight is weakness; then it needs the UN’s imprimatur to repackage failure as collective responsibility. That’s why the sentence works: it compresses a full arc of hubris, backlash, and rhetorical scrambling into one contrast.
Context note: Schuyler’s stated dates (1657-1724) don’t align with the UN or Iraq War language, so the attribution appears anachronistic. Read it as modern criticism in the register of political accountability, not a literal early-modern statement.
“Quagmire” is the moral accelerant. It doesn’t just mean a difficult war. It’s a metaphor for strategic overreach that sucks in credibility, money, and lives while offering no clean exit. Once that framing takes hold, asking the UN for help reads less like diplomacy than damage control - an attempt to outsource legitimacy and share the burden after insisting you didn’t need either.
The subtext is as much about narrative management as foreign policy. First, the administration builds a story where international oversight is weakness; then it needs the UN’s imprimatur to repackage failure as collective responsibility. That’s why the sentence works: it compresses a full arc of hubris, backlash, and rhetorical scrambling into one contrast.
Context note: Schuyler’s stated dates (1657-1724) don’t align with the UN or Iraq War language, so the attribution appears anachronistic. Read it as modern criticism in the register of political accountability, not a literal early-modern statement.
Quote Details
| Topic | War |
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