Leadership Quote by Peter DeFazio

There is a deliberate quietness to DeFazio's line: it’s a political argument disguised as a mood report. “Even” does most of the work, smuggling in the assumption that Sunnis are typically presumed sympathetic to insurgency, then flipping that expectation to claim a turning point. The phrasing isn’t about empathy so much as leverage. If “the majority” of Sunnis are “tired,” then the U.S. can stop treating the conflict as a monolithic sectarian problem and start framing it as a solvable issue of isolating outsiders.

The key term is “foreign terrorists.” It narrows blame to non-Iraqis, an intentional move in the mid-2000s Iraq debate when “al-Qaeda in Iraq” became the shorthand villain in Washington. By spotlighting “foreign” actors, DeFazio taps a powerful nationalist logic: communities may disagree bitterly, but they often unite against outsiders who hijack local grievances. That subtext supports a policy pivot without saying it outright: insurgency can be politically peeled away if Sunnis are ready to reject imported extremists.

The context is also domestic. A Democratic member of Congress criticizing or recalibrating the Iraq War needed a narrative that didn’t read as “abandoning Iraq.” This line offers a palatable alternative: the problem isn’t Iraqis as such; it’s external militants, and Iraqis themselves are increasingly on the same side of that diagnosis. It’s coalition-building rhetoric aimed as much at American skeptics as at Iraqi realities.