Leadership Quote by Bill Pascrell

A good political attack doesn’t just accuse an opponent of failure; it flips the moral arithmetic of the “War on Terror” back onto the people prosecuting it. Bill Pascrell’s line is engineered to do exactly that. The first sentence makes a bleak, prosecutorial claim: the post-9/11 security project hasn’t merely fallen short, it has been net-additive for terror. “Created” is the loaded verb here. It reframes terrorism not as an external contagion imported into history, but as a predictable byproduct of choices made in Washington - invasions, detentions, civilian casualties, humiliation, chaos.

Then comes the sharper pivot: Iraq. “There weren’t any terrorists in Iraq in 2003” is less a footnote than a devastating simplification meant to puncture the central justification for the invasion. Pascrell compresses a sprawling debate about intelligence, insurgency, and al-Qaeda’s evolution into a single before-and-after contrast that a voter can hold in their head. The subtext is blunt: the administration didn’t just misread the threat; it seeded it.

Context matters: this is a Democratic politician speaking into the mid-2000s backlash against the Bush era, when the absence of WMDs and the rise of insurgent violence made the Iraq project look not only costly but strategically incoherent. The line’s intent is to strip the presidency of its post-9/11 aura of competence and moral clarity. It treats security policy like a balance sheet - and claims the numbers are damning.