Politics & Power Quote by Douglas Feith

Conditional optimism is doing a lot of laundering here. “If all goes well” isn’t a throwaway hedge; it’s the sentence’s moral escape hatch. Douglas Feith, a key Pentagon architect of the Iraq War, packages a maximalist geopolitical bet as a reasonable forecast, then preemptively assigns blame to fate if the bet collapses. The phrase implies that the plan is sound and only execution or unforeseeable turbulence could derail it, a neat way to separate authorship from outcome.

The rhetoric is also tellingly generic. “A country” and “a representative government” sound like IKEA-democracy: modular, exportable, designed to fit any space. It avoids the gritty specifics that make or break state-building - sectarian power-sharing, security monopolies, oil revenue allocation, borders, militias - and replaces them with a checklist of virtues. “Representative” is especially slippery: it suggests legitimacy without committing to how representation will be engineered, protected, or reconciled with coercive realities on the ground.

Then comes the regional line: “at peace with its neighbors and in the region.” That’s the strategic sales pitch. The war wasn’t merely about Iraq; it was framed as a lever to reorder the Middle East into something safer for U.S. interests. Subtext: Iraq becomes proof-of-concept, a domino with a press release.

In context, this is preemptive narrative management: paint the destination in soft-focus ideals so the journey’s violence, uncertainty, and political trade-offs feel like temporary weather, not structural flaws in the forecast.