Leadership Quote by John Conyers

Conyers is doing something politicians rarely do in wartime: treating ambiguity as a liability, not a tactical asset. The line turns on a blunt diagnosis - that the U.S. presence in Iraq was suffering not only from bad execution, but from a credibility vacuum. "Confidence about our intentions" is diplomatic phrasing for a harsher reality: Iraqis could not tell whether Americans were there to secure the country, reshape it, extract advantage, or simply avoid admitting failure. In an occupation, that uncertainty is not abstract; it becomes the daily logic by which people decide whether to cooperate, resist, or pick up a gun.

The rhetorical move is also an indictment tucked inside a conditional. Conyers frames his critique as a shared goal ("if we want...") to make it harder to dismiss as unpatriotic. But the subtext is accusatory: U.S. policy, by failing to state a clear endgame, is "adding fuel" to the very insurgency and terrorism it claims to fight. That metaphor matters. Fire spreads when oxygen and accelerants meet; he implies American actions are not merely reacting to violence but materially sustaining it.

Contextually, this lands in the long aftershock of the Iraq invasion, when official rationales had shifted from WMDs to democratization to counterterrorism, each change corroding trust. Conyers, a skeptical congressional voice, is pushing a core counterinsurgency insight into the public arena: legitimacy is strategic. Clarifying intent is not PR; it's an attempt to stop creating enemies faster than you can capture them.