Leadership Quote by Jim Gerlach

The line works less as a statement of fact than as a retroactive justification machine: it tries to turn Iraq from a contested war into a catalytic “lesson” that allegedly disciplined other regimes. Gerlach’s key move is the counterfactual - “Had the United States not acted” - a rhetorical escape hatch that can’t be cleanly disproven because it lives in the world of might-have-beens. By pairing that hypothetical with “likely,” he lowers the evidentiary bar again, offering probability in place of proof while still demanding credit.

The subtext is deterrence branding. Qadhafi’s 2003 decision to abandon parts of his WMD programs is framed not as Libya’s pragmatic recalculation after years of sanctions, intelligence pressure, and a post-9/11 desire to re-enter the global economy, but as fear-induced compliance sparked by American force. That framing shores up a larger argument: even if Iraq’s premises were shaky or the costs obscene, the war “worked” by changing the behavior of others.

Notice the careful stacking of verbs: “declared,” “submitted,” “voluntarily dismantled.” “Voluntarily” is doing heavy lifting, washing coercion into consent and recasting international inspections as a moral conversion rather than a negotiated bargain. Context matters: this is the post-invasion era when U.S. officials and allies searched for tangible wins to offset the absence of discovered stockpiles in Iraq. Invoking Qadhafi is also politically tidy: it offers a clear before/after story, even if history is messier - and, grimly, later events in Libya would make that neat deterrence narrative harder to sustain.