War & Peace Quote by Paul Gillmor

Gillmor’s sentence turns a messy occupation into a neat moral diagram: “our efforts” equals stability; “insurgents” equal chaos. The intent is less to describe Iraq than to discipline the American narrative about Iraq. By framing resistance as a threat to “the region,” not just to U.S. troops, he enlarges the stakes and preempts the question that haunted the war’s middle years: if Iraqis are fighting, who are they fighting for?

The subtext sits in the pronouns. “Our efforts” assumes legitimacy as a given, like reconstruction is a neutral public service rather than a contested project backed by foreign force. Then comes the psychological pivot: “They fight not for their country, but rather against ours.” It’s a rhetorical trap door. Any insurgent motive that might sound political (anti-occupation, sectarian fear, local power struggles, nationalism) gets flattened into anti-Americanism. Once you accept that premise, negotiation looks like appeasement, and withdrawal looks like surrender.

Context matters: mid-2000s Washington rhetoric was under pressure from rising casualties, insurgent sophistication, and eroding public support. Calling opponents “insurgents” already casts them as illegitimate actors; adding that they’re not “for” Iraq frames them as alien to Iraqi interests, even when many insurgent groups explicitly claimed nationalist credentials. The line works politically because it offers clarity where the situation offered none: it redraws a civil conflict with foreign occupation into a simple duel of stability versus sabotage, with the U.S. positioned as the author of order and the Iraqi fighter as a villain who doesn’t even belong to his own homeland.