Politics & Power Quote by Nancy Pelosi

Pelosi’s line lands because it refuses the comforting ritual of wartime hindsight. “Absolutely no regret” isn’t just personal vindication; it’s a deliberate rebuke to Washington’s favorite escape hatch: support the invasion, mourn the aftermath, and call it a learning experience. She’s staking out a moral and managerial objection at once, and the pairing is the point.

Notice how she builds a prosecutor’s ledger: “cost in human lives” comes first, then “cost to our budget,” then the clincher of “probably 100 billion.” It’s an argument aimed at two audiences who rarely share a language: the anti-war conscience and the fiscal realist. The phrase “The same questions remain” is the sharpest knife here. It implies the war’s advocates never answered the original case for force, and that time hasn’t laundered the absence of clarity into legitimacy.

Then she punctures the iconic image that sold the war to millions: the toppling of Saddam’s statue. “We could have probably brought down that statue for a lot less” is a darkly effective piece of deflation, reducing a made-for-TV triumph to a procurement problem. The subtext is brutal: if the most tangible “win” can be replicated cheaply, what exactly did the nation buy with blood and debt?

Context matters: Pelosi is speaking from within a party and a country still wrestling with Iraq’s cascading consequences. The intent isn’t to rehearse old debates; it’s to prevent amnesia from becoming policy.