Politics & Power Quote by Bill Kristol

The line is a warning disguised as punditry: not about Iraq’s merits, but about the fragility of presidential legitimacy once deception becomes the dominant story. Kristol’s phrasing is surgical. “If” keeps him hypothetically clean, “really” signals that casual suspicion doesn’t count, and “settled belief” frames public opinion as a tipping-point phenomenon - slow to form, hard to reverse. He’s not predicting scandal; he’s describing the moment when a presidency stops being interpreted through policy outcomes and starts being interpreted through motive.

The subtext is about narrative control. “Bush lied us into war” isn’t just an accusation of factual error; it’s an accusation of intent, the political equivalent of premeditation. Kristol understands that democracies can forgive failure and even tolerate incompetence, but they struggle to tolerate betrayal. If the public concludes the casus belli was manufactured, every subsequent act of governance gets reread as suspect. That’s what “his presidency will be over” really means: not impeachment per se, but the loss of moral authority, the evaporation of consent.

Context matters. In the mid-2000s, the Iraq War debate shifted from “Was it worth it?” to “Was the rationale honest?” Kristol, a leading neoconservative voice, is implicitly conceding that the war’s political survivability depends less on battlefield metrics than on credibility at home. It’s an insider’s admission that the real front is epistemic: who gets believed, and when belief calcifies into verdict.