Time & Perspective Quote by Condoleezza Rice

"It is high time" is the tell: a moral clock is being brandished as a diplomatic instrument. Rice isn’t merely urging action; she’s staging impatience as legitimacy. The phrase implies that delay itself is a form of complicity, that every additional day spent talking is a day the "international community" fails its own standards. That framing turns urgency into a kind of virtue, neatly preempting the charge that Washington is rushing toward confrontation.

The sentence then performs a careful reclassification. By insisting this is "not an issue of negotiation with the U.N.", Rice strips Iraq of the status of a normal bargaining partner and strips the U.N. of its usual role as a forum for compromise. This is compliance theater, not diplomacy: obligations were "undertook in 1991", therefore the present is an enforcement moment, not a deliberative one. The time stamp matters. It anchors the argument in the post-Gulf War settlement and implies a ledger of debts long overdue, converting a contested, evolving security question into a contractual breach.

Subtextually, "international community" does double work. It invokes global consensus while quietly pressuring skeptics to fall in line, because to dissent is to place oneself outside the community’s moral perimeter. Naming "Saddam Hussein and his regime" personalizes the target, narrowing the issue from Iraq as a state to a delegitimized ruling apparatus - an early move toward making coercion sound like accountability rather than war.

In context, this rhetoric sits in the run-up to the Iraq invasion: a strategy of foreclosing negotiation, converting uncertainty into obligation, and packaging enforcement as overdue inevitability.