Politics & Power Quote by Neil Sheehan

Moral certainty is the most efficient anesthetic in American power, and Neil Sheehan is naming the drug, not the patient. His sentence turns on a brutal loop: purpose becomes proof, and proof becomes permission. The more "innately good" Americans believe their aims to be, the easier it is to treat someone else's suffering as administrative overhead. Sheehan isn't describing simple hypocrisy; he's describing a psychological mechanism that lets decent self-conceptions coexist with indecent outcomes.

The phrasing matters. "Remember" is a reporter's nudge and an indictment: the facts are on the record, but the public keeps misplacing them. "Saw their purpose" flags perception over reality; the story a nation tells itself is doing the heavy lifting. Then comes the quiet violence of the passive: "pain they would inflict" is both direct and oddly sanitized, as if the harm is regrettable but necessary, the cost of doing business for virtue. When he repeats "so good" and "justify", he exposes the rhetorical self-licking ice cream cone: goodness isn't demonstrated by results, it is asserted as a premise that retroactively blesses whatever follows.

Sheehan's context is Vietnam-era reporting, where the gap between official language and lived consequences became impossible to ignore. His subtext lands squarely on the American habit of converting ideals into alibis - democracy, freedom, security - and then acting shocked when the ledger includes bodies. It's not anti-American so much as anti-innocence: a demand to stop confusing intention with absolution, and to measure "purpose" by the people it breaks.