"It is now conventional wisdom that Americans do not care why we went to war in Iraq, that it is enough that the world is better off without Saddam Hussein"
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Schiff’s line is a scalpel aimed at a very American kind of moral laziness: the desire to treat outcomes as retroactive justification. By calling it “conventional wisdom,” he’s not endorsing it; he’s indicting how quickly a controversial war can be reframed as a tidy civic consensus. The phrase does a lot of work. “Conventional” suggests social pressure, the way elite narratives harden into dinner-party orthodoxy. “Wisdom” adds a sly bite: what’s being labeled mature and pragmatic is, in his telling, a refusal to think.
The construction hinges on a bargain: “Americans do not care why” as long as “it is enough” that Saddam is gone. That’s not just critique of voter attention spans; it’s a warning about the precedent. If motives, evidence, and process don’t matter, leaders are effectively invited to gamble with war, confident that a later, morally legible endpoint will wash the record clean. Schiff is flagging the logic that turns accountability into vibes.
The context is the post-invasion narrative shift, when the collapse of WMD claims forced supporters of the Iraq War to lean harder on humanitarian and regime-change arguments. Schiff, a Democrat who built a reputation as an institutionalist and prosecutor of executive overreach, is pressing on the uncomfortable question: if we let “the world is better off” end the discussion, we normalize deception as a policy tool. The subtext is less about Saddam than about what democracy becomes when memory is optional.
The construction hinges on a bargain: “Americans do not care why” as long as “it is enough” that Saddam is gone. That’s not just critique of voter attention spans; it’s a warning about the precedent. If motives, evidence, and process don’t matter, leaders are effectively invited to gamble with war, confident that a later, morally legible endpoint will wash the record clean. Schiff is flagging the logic that turns accountability into vibes.
The context is the post-invasion narrative shift, when the collapse of WMD claims forced supporters of the Iraq War to lean harder on humanitarian and regime-change arguments. Schiff, a Democrat who built a reputation as an institutionalist and prosecutor of executive overreach, is pressing on the uncomfortable question: if we let “the world is better off” end the discussion, we normalize deception as a policy tool. The subtext is less about Saddam than about what democracy becomes when memory is optional.
Quote Details
| Topic | War |
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