"In the post-9/11 world you cannot give him the benefit of the doubt. As a result of our going into Iraq, not only is Saddam Hussein gone, but Qaddafi has given up his weapons of mass destruction and tremendous progress is being made in Iraq"
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The line is built like a moral cudgel: “post-9/11” isn’t just a timestamp, it’s a permission slip. By declaring that you “cannot give him the benefit of the doubt,” King frames skepticism as negligence and caution as complicity. It’s an argument that preempts debate by turning uncertainty into danger.
The structure is classic post-crisis salesmanship. Start with fear, then pivot to a neat ledger of wins: Saddam gone, Qaddafi disarmed, “tremendous progress” underway. Each clause is designed to make Iraq sound like a strategic domino that knocked other threats into compliance. The subtext is political triage: don’t look too closely at the costs, because the narrative needs outcomes, not nuance. “Not only... but” is doing heavy lifting, bundling unrelated or contested claims into a single causal chain. Iraq becomes not a war with its own moral and practical burdens, but a force multiplier for global security.
Context matters: this is the era when supporters of the invasion searched for retrospective justification as the original WMD rationale collapsed. Invoking Qaddafi’s disarmament functions as a retroactive proof of deterrence, a way to argue that even if Iraq’s WMD weren’t found, the invasion still “worked” elsewhere. It also quietly lowers the evidentiary bar: you don’t need smoking guns, just the assertion that enemies are watching and adjusting.
What makes it rhetorically effective is also what makes it slippery: it converts correlation into causation, and grief into doctrine. The goal isn’t to persuade skeptics on facts; it’s to lock the moral frame so dissent sounds unsafe.
The structure is classic post-crisis salesmanship. Start with fear, then pivot to a neat ledger of wins: Saddam gone, Qaddafi disarmed, “tremendous progress” underway. Each clause is designed to make Iraq sound like a strategic domino that knocked other threats into compliance. The subtext is political triage: don’t look too closely at the costs, because the narrative needs outcomes, not nuance. “Not only... but” is doing heavy lifting, bundling unrelated or contested claims into a single causal chain. Iraq becomes not a war with its own moral and practical burdens, but a force multiplier for global security.
Context matters: this is the era when supporters of the invasion searched for retrospective justification as the original WMD rationale collapsed. Invoking Qaddafi’s disarmament functions as a retroactive proof of deterrence, a way to argue that even if Iraq’s WMD weren’t found, the invasion still “worked” elsewhere. It also quietly lowers the evidentiary bar: you don’t need smoking guns, just the assertion that enemies are watching and adjusting.
What makes it rhetorically effective is also what makes it slippery: it converts correlation into causation, and grief into doctrine. The goal isn’t to persuade skeptics on facts; it’s to lock the moral frame so dissent sounds unsafe.
Quote Details
| Topic | War |
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