Politics & Power Quote by Paul Bremer

Bremer’s praise lands like a ceremonial ribbon-cutting in the middle of a construction zone that’s still on fire. Calling Iraqi “patience and courage” “extraordinary” is less a description than a political instrument: it shifts the moral spotlight onto ordinary Iraqis while quietly laundering the occupying authority’s own performance. The admiration is real enough, but it’s also strategic. If Iraqis are courageous, then the turmoil becomes proof of their heroism rather than evidence of a shattered state.

The phrase “in the last few months” does heavy lifting. It compresses a violent, disorienting upheaval into a manageable news cycle, suggesting momentum and control. Bremer isn’t just honoring endurance; he’s building a narrative of progress that can travel back to Washington and London as measurable “success,” a word that functions like a seal on a report. “On the way to success” is careful hedging: not success, but an itinerary toward it. Hope, but with plausible deniability.

The subtext is about authorship. “They have really put a political system on the way” credits Iraqis with agency while leaving unspoken who designed the timetable, dissolved institutions, and held the levers of power. “A real democracy here” is a pointed insistence, signaling awareness of skepticism at home and abroad. It’s also a preemptive rebuttal to charges of imperial management: democracy is framed as emergent, local, legitimate.

Context matters: Bremer, as head of the Coalition Provisional Authority, needed optimism to be governance. The line sells endurance as consent and hardship as a down payment on legitimacy, asking listeners to read suffering as a necessary stage of a story whose ending is already morally decided.