Success Quote by Peter Camejo

“Deep down” is doing sly work here: it claims access to a buried, authentic Iraqi will that official narratives conveniently miss. Camejo isn’t just reporting an opinion; he’s challenging the legitimacy of speaking for Iraqis at all. The phrasing implies that public-facing signals of cooperation with U.S. forces are coerced, conditional, or distorted by the pressures of occupation. It’s an argument about power and epistemology as much as policy: who gets to define what Iraq wants when soldiers, contracts, and political survival are all on the table?

The second sentence flips from psychological certainty to moral imperative. “Self-determination” is the heavyweight term, historically tied to anti-colonial struggles and international law, and it reframes withdrawal not as a strategic concession but as a baseline respect owed to a nation. That move matters because it strips away the usual U.S. debate vocabulary - “stability,” “security,” “terror,” “nation-building” - and replaces it with a principle that makes prolonged presence look less like protection and more like denial of agency.

Contextually, the quote lands in the shadow of the Iraq War’s contested justification and mounting evidence that “liberation” could quickly resemble control. Coming from a businessman-turned-politician-activist like Camejo, it also carries a domestic critique: Americans are being sold an occupation as altruism, while Iraqis are presumed to consent. The intent is to puncture that presumption and force the audience to treat Iraqi preference as dispositive, not decorative.