War & Peace Quote by John Conyers

Conyers threads a needle that every war critic in Washington is forced to pick up: how to oppose a mission without being branded as opposing the people sent to carry it out. Leading with "I am a Korean War veteran" isn’t memoir; it’s armor. He claims the cultural authority that politicians regularly borrow but rarely earn, then uses it to make dissent harder to dismiss as softness, elitism, or moral posing.

The pivot matters: "I support our troops... but I do so by advocating redeployment". In two clauses, he flips the most overused slogan in post-9/11 politics into a moral indictment. Support isn’t waving flags or writing blank checks; it’s limiting exposure to a war he implies has drifted from necessity into inertia. That "as much as anyone in this body" is a quiet jab at colleagues who treat troop-support as a partisan cudgel, not a responsibility with measurable outcomes.

"Out of Iraq as soon as it can be safely done" is the key hedge. It signals seriousness and avoids the caricature of an impulsive pullout, while still pressing urgency. The subtext: staying indefinitely is its own form of danger, and safety has been used as a pretext for endless delay. Spoken in the Iraq War era, when skepticism was still routinely policed, Conyers is building a permission structure for Congress to reconsider the war without forfeiting patriotism. It’s less a plea than a redefinition of what loyalty looks like when policy is failing.