Politics & Power Quote by John Abizaid

Violence gets packaged here as a stage of development, not a rupture. Coming from John Abizaid, a career general speaking in the long shadow of post-9/11 counterinsurgency, the sentence reads like the managerial voice of modern war: grim forecasts delivered with a reassuring hand on the thermostat. “Strains develop in the political process” is bureaucratic euphemism doing heavy lifting, converting blood-and-fear into “strains,” as if a country were a bridge under load rather than a society unraveling. That’s the intent: to normalize instability as a predictable byproduct of transition, and to frame the speaker as the adult in the room who can model it, measure it, contain it.

The subtext is where the power sits. “Everywhere in the country” widens the blast radius, but “controllable” and “workable” yank it back into the realm of operational competence. It’s a promise aimed less at “these people” than at the audiences who worry about headlines, domestic patience, and political blowback: policymakers, allies, the public. The phrase “these people” itself betrays distance. It’s compassionate in posture, paternalistic in grammar, implying that the subjects of violence are also the beneficiaries of the violence’s supposed purpose.

Context matters: this is the logic of nation-building under armed occupation, when democracy is sold as an engineering problem with unfortunate but manageable side effects. The rhetoric tries to launder coercion into progress: if violence is “workable,” then the moral crisis becomes a technical challenge. That’s why it works politically and why it should make listeners uneasy. It asks you to accept suffering as both inevitable and instrumental, while assuring you the professionals have it under control.