War & Peace Quote by Howard Fineman

Fineman’s line works because it’s a tight little booby trap of optimism, quotation marks implied. By yoking “If we are lucky” to “and George W. Bush is right,” he signals that the best-case scenario depends on two notoriously unstable things: chance and a president whose Iraq rhetoric was drenched in certainty. The phrasing doesn’t just hedge; it quietly indicts the whole sales pitch.

“War of the Happy Iraqis” is the real needle. It riffs on the post-9/11 branding of conflict as moral theater: liberation as spectacle, gratitude as proof. Fineman turns that marketing logic inside out. Wars are usually titled for what they cost or what they break; calling it a war of “happy” people highlights how unnatural that framing is, like naming a hurricane after the pleasant weather that follows. The sarcasm is controlled, not snide; it’s the kind of deadpan that journalists use when the facts are too grim to state outright.

Contextually, it lands in the era when the Bush administration leaned hard on a narrative of imminent welcome - topple a dictator, trigger democracy, receive flowers. Fineman is registering the media class’s uneasy awareness that the public case for Iraq was being built not only on weapons claims but on an emotional storyboard: cheering crowds, clean outcomes, a conflict that could be morally uncomplicated if only everyone cooperated. The subtext: if the “happy Iraqis” don’t materialize, the premise collapses - and the accountability can’t be outsourced to luck.