War & Peace Quote by Richard Perle

There is a chilling seduction in how Perle wraps apocalypse in the language of legacy. The line starts with “vision,” a word that usually belongs to idealists, and then quietly smuggles in its real payload: abandon “clever diplomacy” and “wage a total war.” The rhetorical trick is the pairing of moral certainty with impatience. Diplomacy isn’t debated on the merits; it’s framed as fussy, fragmented, even cowardly - “piece together” makes statecraft sound like a hobby project. Total war, by contrast, is presented as clean, decisive, almost spiritually clarifying: embrace the vision “entirely.”

The subtext is less about strategy than about permission. “If we just let” implies the only obstacle is restraint, that history’s natural course is violence unless timid technocrats get in the way. And the payoff isn’t security but myth. “Our children will sing great songs about us” is an appeal to future adoration, a promise that brutality will be redeemed by narrative. It’s the romance of being remembered, the oldest anesthetic for the costs that don’t fit into speeches: civilian deaths, blowback, moral injury, the messy afterlife of “total” solutions.

Placed in the orbit of Perle’s reputation as a hawkish Washington operator - especially in the post-9/11 ecosystem where maximalist confidence often substituted for granular planning - the quote reads as a case study in how policy gets sold. Not with details, but with destiny. The danger is that it treats war as a story we get to write, rather than a reality that writes back.