"It is no coincidence that our country has not been attacked since 9-11. Our initiatives to protect the homeland and aggressively take the fight to the terrorists have been factors in that success"
About this Quote
The line is built to turn absence into proof. By insisting "It is no coincidence", Wicker pre-empts the obvious counterargument: that not being attacked can stem from luck, shifting enemy capacity, intelligence work across administrations, or the simple rarity of spectacular plots. The rhetorical move is a conversion trick: a negative data point (nothing happened) becomes affirmative evidence (our strategy worked), and the audience is nudged to treat doubt as naivete.
The phrase "protect the homeland" functions as a political umbrella. It’s emotionally loaded, deliberately vague, and expansive enough to cover everything from airport screening and surveillance to militarized policing. Then comes the real tell: "aggressively take the fight to the terrorists". That’s not just a description of policy; it’s a moral posture. "Aggressively" signals resolve, and "fight" frames terrorism as a battlefield problem rather than a law enforcement, diplomatic, or social one. It flatters a certain civic temperament: safety purchased through toughness.
Subtextually, the quote asks for retrospective authorization of the post-9/11 security state and foreign interventions by claiming a measurable payoff. It also smuggles in a partisan argument without naming a party: if these initiatives are "factors in that success", then reducing them is gambling with national survival.
Context matters: a sitting politician in the long afterglow of 9/11 is speaking into an electorate trained to treat security as a permanent emergency. The sentence is less about causal rigor than about inoculating a policy legacy against criticism by making fear of reversal the default.
The phrase "protect the homeland" functions as a political umbrella. It’s emotionally loaded, deliberately vague, and expansive enough to cover everything from airport screening and surveillance to militarized policing. Then comes the real tell: "aggressively take the fight to the terrorists". That’s not just a description of policy; it’s a moral posture. "Aggressively" signals resolve, and "fight" frames terrorism as a battlefield problem rather than a law enforcement, diplomatic, or social one. It flatters a certain civic temperament: safety purchased through toughness.
Subtextually, the quote asks for retrospective authorization of the post-9/11 security state and foreign interventions by claiming a measurable payoff. It also smuggles in a partisan argument without naming a party: if these initiatives are "factors in that success", then reducing them is gambling with national survival.
Context matters: a sitting politician in the long afterglow of 9/11 is speaking into an electorate trained to treat security as a permanent emergency. The sentence is less about causal rigor than about inoculating a policy legacy against criticism by making fear of reversal the default.
Quote Details
| Topic | War |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
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