Politics & Power Quote by Jim Sensenbrenner

The sentence does what post-9/11 political language often aims to do: widen the moral distance so far between "us" and "them" that almost any policy feels like common sense. Sensenbrenner isn’t arguing a specific tactic so much as pre-loading the debate with a frame: the threat is uniquely shameless ("no qualms"), the victims are maximally sympathetic ("innocent men, women, and children"), and the response must be maximally resourced ("all the help they can get"). Once you accept that setup, skepticism starts to look like negligence.

The intent is coalition-building through urgency. By pairing "our nation" with "the governments of other countries", he gestures at legitimacy and inevitability: the War on Terror isn’t a U.S. choice but a global necessity. That line also smooths over questions about sovereignty, international law, and the messy reality that allies often disagree on methods. The phrase "War on Terrorism" carries its own subtext: terrorism as an enemy actor rather than a tactic, allowing a potentially open-ended conflict with flexible targets.

What makes the rhetoric effective is its asymmetry. It insists on innocence on one side and absolute moral vacancy on the other, leaving little room to discuss civilian casualties, blowback, or civil-liberties tradeoffs without sounding like you’re minimizing dead children. In Sensenbrenner’s legislative context (a law-and-order House Republican prominent on judiciary issues), the line functions as a permission slip: expanded surveillance, harsher enforcement, broader executive powers. The emotional core is genuine grief; the political utility is that grief doubles as leverage.