Politics & Power Quote by Tom Lantos

Insurgencies don’t just erupt; they recruit. Lantos’s sentence is built to puncture the comforting fiction that violence in Iraq was primarily a matter of “bad actors” acting in a vacuum. The verb choice does the heavy lifting: “capitalized” is a market word, cold and transactional, implying strategic opportunism rather than ideology or destiny. It reframes insurgents as political entrepreneurs exploiting a predictable resource: grievance.

The quote’s intent is disciplinary. As a diplomat and legislator, Lantos is implicitly scolding both Washington and Baghdad for creating the conditions insurgents thrive on: humiliation, civilian harm, corruption, exclusion, and the daily indignities of an occupation and a shaky state. “Popular resentment and anger” functions as the indictment; it puts mass sentiment, not clandestine manipulation, at the center of the story. That’s a hard message for policymakers because it suggests the problem isn’t only security failures, but legitimacy failures.

Subtext: the insurgency is not merely fighting the government; it’s outcompeting it in the one currency that matters after regime change - trust. Lantos’s phrase “the faith of Iraqi citizens” is almost religious, casting governance as a moral relationship. Once “severely undermined,” you don’t rebuild it with raids and press conferences.

Context matters: this is the post-invasion reality where the U.S. promised democracy but delivered disorder, and where a new Iraqi government was expected to inherit authority before it had earned credibility. Lantos is warning that every misstep becomes insurgent fundraising, recruitment, and narrative fuel - a self-reinforcing loop that turns tactical errors into strategic defeat.