War & Peace Quote by Douglas Hurd

“Self defence” is doing a lot of laundering here: it takes the raw, aggressive verb “went to war” and rinses it in the clean language of necessity. Douglas Hurd, an old-school British foreign policy hand, isn’t just justifying past action in Afghanistan; he’s pre-authorizing the next one in Iraq. The sentence is built like a bridge: Afghanistan as precedent, Iraq as destination. If you accept the first as defensive, the second can be framed as merely consistent.

The specific intent is to plant moral and legal legitimacy. In the post-9/11 climate, “self defence” isn’t a feeling; it’s a doctrine with implications under international law and alliance politics. It signals to a domestic audience that this isn’t adventurism, and to Washington that Britain will stay in step, not as a vassal but as a principled partner. That’s the performance.

The subtext is more transactional. By collapsing two very different cases into one motive, Hurd smooths over the awkward question of immediacy. Afghanistan could plausibly be sold as a response to an attack and its architects. Iraq required an argument about future threats, preemption dressed up as defence. The phrasing quietly normalizes that shift: from retaliating against what happened to striking against what might.

Context matters: this is the early-2000s rhetorical ecosystem where “security” became an all-purpose solvent for doubt. Hurd’s line works because it offers listeners a single, stabilizing story when the facts were messy and the consequences unknowable.