Politics & Power Quote by Marty Meehan

The line is built to weaponize reverence. By opening with "our brave men and women in uniform", Meehan wraps himself in the safest possible patriotic cloth, then pivots hard: if the troops have done "everything their country has asked", the only remaining culprit is civilian leadership. The praise isn’t just gratitude; it’s a moral receipt. The implicit bargain is clear: service has been paid in full, so the government owes a deliverable in return.

"Three years now" is the quiet dagger. It does the work of an indictment without reciting body counts or policy minutiae. Time becomes evidence of incompetence. And the phrase "win the peace" is a deliberate reframing that lets him argue against the Iraq War without sounding anti-war in the simplistic, culture-war way. It concedes that winning battles is not the point; the administration’s failure is strategic and administrative, not just tactical.

The subtext is also intra-American: this is aimed at voters tired of open-ended sacrifice, and at families who can be thanked endlessly but not given an exit ramp. By naming Bush directly, Meehan turns a diffuse, complicated conflict into a solvable political problem with a single address.

Context matters: around 2006, "bring our troops home" had become a bipartisan pressure point, while "plan" was the keyword used to make withdrawal sound like competence, not retreat. Meehan’s intent is to claim the mantle of support-the-troops while making the war’s continuation look like a betrayal of them.