War & Peace Quote by George Voinovich

“Will take time” is the politician’s favorite solvent: it dissolves urgency, accountability, and the messy arithmetic of cause and effect. George Voinovich’s line arrives from the early-2000s U.S. moment when “liberation” was sold as both moral mission and managerial project. The phrasing wraps an invasion in the language of renovation. Iraq isn’t a sovereign country smashed open by war; it’s a property with “a legacy” that can be cleared out, like old carpet. Violence is positioned as inherited, ambient, almost cultural, rather than exacerbated by the very intervention now being defended.

The intent is reassurance with a preemptive alibi. By framing peace and prosperity as a “path,” Voinovich turns a contested occupation into a journey narrative: setbacks become “growing pains,” not indictments. “Peace and prosperity” functions as a doubled promise: security for the strategic-minded, market uplift for the economically minded. It’s broad enough to unite hawks, moderates, and donors while staying vague enough to survive changing facts on the ground.

Subtext: temper expectations before the bill arrives. “Time” here is political time, measured in election cycles and public patience. The sentence implicitly asks for continued funding, continued faith, and continued permission to define progress. In that way, it’s not just about Iraq; it’s about managing the American audience’s relationship to an open-ended conflict, keeping moral certainty intact while the timeline stretches into the horizon.