War & Peace Quote by Barbara Boxer

The sentence is built like a prosecutor’s closing argument: sober, procedural, and carefully fenced in by bureaucratic language that sounds apolitical even as it primes the listener for escalation. Boxer anchors her claim in the legitimizing glow of “commitments after the Gulf War,” invoking a prior contract rather than a fresh appetite for conflict. That move matters. It frames Iraq not as a complicated adversary but as a delinquent signatory in an international rulebook the US helped write. The moral logic becomes administrative: agreements were made, obligations were clear, compliance failed.

“Completely dismantle” is doing heavy work. It’s absolute, maximal, and therefore rhetorically useful; partial cooperation can’t count, ambiguity can’t survive. Then comes the velvet hammer: “unfortunately.” The word signals regret and restraint, a performance of reluctance that allows a hawkish conclusion to wear a moderate mask. It suggests that the speaker isn’t eager for punishment; Iraq forced the issue by “not lived up” to the deal. That phrasing also slides agency away from US policy choices and onto Iraqi noncompliance, pre-loading blame for whatever comes next.

The context is the post-1991 inspection regime and the early 2000s political environment where “weapons of mass destruction” operated as a fear keyword: broad enough to gather nuclear, chemical, and biological threats under one umbrella, vivid enough to compress technical disputes into a single, ominous charge. Boxer's intent is to claim the high ground of enforcement and credibility, not vengeance: the US isn’t changing the rules, it’s collecting on them.