Leadership Quote by Chris Van Hollen

"Take our eye off the ball" is the kind of sports-metaphor understatement politicians use when the real charge is far harsher: strategic malpractice. Chris Van Hollen frames the post-9/11 pivot not as a partisan betrayal but as a basic failure of focus, a lapse any listener can picture. That’s the rhetorical trick. By choosing a cliché with built-in commonsense authority, he smuggles in an indictment of elite decision-making without sounding like he’s relitigating ideology.

The intent is twofold. First, it re-centers Afghanistan as the “job” America was supposed to finish, implying a clear objective abandoned midstream. Second, it casts Iraq as the distraction - not just a separate war, but the choice that degraded the original mission. The word “decided” matters: this wasn’t fate, it was agency. Someone made a call, and the bill came due.

Subtextually, Van Hollen is also managing political risk. He doesn’t name names, doesn’t invoke weapons of mass destruction, and doesn’t dwell on moral arguments. “If you look at the situation on the ground” gestures toward an empirical, non-ideological verdict, as if the facts themselves have rendered judgment. “Unfortunately” signals regret rather than rage - a posture that invites agreement from voters exhausted by the war debate.

Context is the long shadow of the Iraq invasion on U.S. credibility and capacity. Calling it “a mess” is deliberately plain: a verdict meant to sound inevitable, and therefore damning.