War & Peace Quote by Mike Pence

“Let’s win the peace” is a politician’s paradox on purpose: it borrows the muscular language of war (“win”) to sell something softer, more indefinite, and much harder to measure (“peace”). Pence is trying to do two things at once. First, he reassures a domestic audience that whatever blood and money have already been spent in Iraq can still be converted into a moral, forward-looking payoff. Second, he frames that payoff as both achievable and righteous, not as a messy, contingent project.

The phrase “democracy the good people of Iraq so richly deserve” is doing heavy rhetorical lifting. “Good people” divides Iraq into innocents and villains, making regime change feel like rescue rather than intervention. “So richly deserve” turns democracy into a kind of overdue inheritance, implying the United States isn’t imposing a system but delivering a delayed reward. It’s flattery with a strategic edge: praising Iraqis in the abstract helps sidestep the specifics of Iraqi politics, sectarian fracture, and the fact that “democracy” can produce outcomes Washington doesn’t like.

“After decades of tyranny” anchors the argument in a clean moral timeline: past evil, future redemption. The subtext is absolution. If the prior regime was tyranny, then the disruption that follows can be narrated as necessary turbulence on the way to a just destination. In the mid-2000s, this language fit the post-9/11 American script: security blended with idealism, and hope offered as a substitute for accountability.