Politics & Power Quote by Jim Gerlach

The sentence is built like a legal brief masquerading as common sense: if everyone believed Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, then the U.S. decision to invade starts to look less like a choice and more like an inevitable response to “the facts.” Jim Gerlach’s intent is defensive, not exploratory. He’s not asking whether the intelligence was sound; he’s widening the circle of blame so the political heat dissipates.

The rhetorical move is the pile-on. “Not only the United States” cues the reader to expect exoneration through consensus, then the list rolls out: French, British, Germans, the United Nations. The breadth is the point. By invoking countries that famously opposed the Iraq invasion (France, Germany) alongside U.S. allies and a global institution, the line tries to collapse disagreement about the war into agreement about the premise. It’s a way of saying: even the skeptics believed the threat, so stop treating this as uniquely American folly.

The subtext is reputational triage in the post-Iraq reckoning, when “WMD” became shorthand for credulity, manipulation, or both. Gerlach isn’t litigating the catastrophic consequences of getting it wrong; he’s litigating culpability. The phrase “before the United States intervened” also quietly sanitizes “invasion,” reframing a contested act of war as a corrective measure. It’s coalition language used after the fact: not to build legitimacy going in, but to redistribute accountability when legitimacy collapses.