Daily Inspiration Quote by Douglas Feith

"I'm concerned about getting Iraq on its feet" is the kind of sentence that tries to smuggle a whole war into the shape of a humanitarian errand. Douglas Feith, a senior Pentagon official during the Iraq invasion, isn’t offering a policy blueprint here; he’s offering a posture. The phrase "concerned" signals empathy without liability. It reads as care, but it doesn’t commit to measurable outcomes, timelines, or responsibility for the conditions that made "on its feet" a necessary aspiration in the first place.

"Getting Iraq on its feet" is doing the heavy rhetorical lifting. It frames a sovereign nation as a fallen body, temporarily incapacitated, awaiting assistance from an implied caretaker. That metaphor quietly grants the speaker authority while sidestepping the more abrasive language of occupation, regime change, or strategic interest. It also naturalizes instability as a technical problem: Iraq is down, we help it stand, story over. The messier questions - Who knocked it down? What does standing look like? Who decides when it’s upright? - are politely pushed offstage.

In context, this diction reflects the post-invasion scramble to recast American intervention as reconstruction rather than rupture. Feith’s intent is to legitimate continued involvement by wrapping it in uplift and practicality. The subtext is reassurance: whatever the costs and controversies, the project is fundamentally benevolent and managerial. That’s why it works rhetorically - it offers moral cover in a sentence engineered to be difficult to argue with, precisely because it is so strategically vague.