War & Peace Quote by Condoleezza Rice

Eleven years is doing a lot of work here. Rice isn’t just counting time; she’s building a moral clock that’s run out. By framing Saddam Hussein’s behavior as “more than a decade” of “defiance,” she turns a messy tangle of inspections, partial compliance, and geopolitical bargaining into a simple narrative arc: patience has been tried, and patience has been exhausted. The phrase “after all” signals that the conclusion is overdue, almost commonsensical, as if the only unreasonable position now is continued delay.

Her diction is legalistic but emotionally primed. “Obligation,” “signed onto,” and “resolutions” invoke contract law and the authority of a rules-based international order. Then she spikes that bureaucratic language with “ignored and flaunted,” a pairing that casts Saddam not merely as noncompliant but contemptuous. “Flaunted” is key: it suggests taunting, a personal insult to the U.N. and, by extension, to the countries claiming to speak for it. That insult invites a response that feels less like choice and more like enforcement.

The subtext is a transfer of legitimacy. Military action, in this telling, isn’t aggression; it’s collection on a debt. By emphasizing “every obligation,” she removes room for gradations or good-faith dispute. The audience is nudged to see the U.N. not as a forum for ongoing negotiation but as a court whose rulings have been mocked for 11 years.

The context, of course, is the post-9/11 security mood and the push toward the Iraq War: a time when “threat to peace and security” functioned as both a formal U.N. phrase and a domestic trigger. Rice’s intent is to make preemption sound like overdue accountability.