War & Peace Quote by Rich Lowry

Lowry’s line is doing two things at once: diagnosing Bush’s certainty and quietly laundering it. By framing the president’s “faith in the rightness” of his strategy as “deep-seated,” the sentence borrows the language of character and conviction, not mere stubbornness. “Deep-seated” suggests something organic, almost virtuous - a rootedness that can be admired even when the results are contested. Then comes the neat rhetorical loop: “It is a product of faith.” The repetition turns analysis into absolution. If the belief is “faith,” it’s insulated from ordinary policy metrics like evidence, revision, or accountability. You can’t fact-check a creed.

The subtext is a familiar post-9/11 posture: leadership as moral clarity. In the early-to-mid Iraq era, critics read Bush’s certainty as ideological rigidity; supporters and sympathetic commentators reframed it as resolve in the face of chaos. Lowry, an editor steeped in movement conservatism, taps that tradition. He’s not arguing the strategy is correct; he’s arguing the president’s confidence is coherent within a worldview. That’s a subtle but consequential move, because it shifts the debate from “Is this working?” to “Do you respect the kind of person who believes?”

There’s also an implicit warning embedded in the compliment. Faith can steady a nation during crisis, but in war it can become a closed system - a way to treat setbacks as tests rather than signals. Lowry’s phrasing captures the appeal and the danger in the same breath, even if it leans toward admiration.