Politics & Power Quote by John Conyers

Conyers frames the Iraq War as a bill coming due, and he’s careful to itemize the charges in a way that traps hawks in their own language. “Price” sounds like fiscal prudence, the kind of metaphor that plays well in committee rooms. Then he expands the ledger: dollars, American lives, Iraqi civilians, and the recruitment bump for terrorists. The move is strategic: you can debate a single metric, but a stacked indictment makes the moral arithmetic harder to dodge.

The intent is oversight with teeth. “Mr. Chairman” signals procedure, but the sentence that follows is built to puncture bureaucratic comfort. Conyers isn’t pleading; he’s presenting an accounting of consequences that Congress, by authorizing and funding the war, can’t pretend is someone else’s problem.

The subtext is an accusation about narratives. By including “Iraqi civilian casualties blamed on America,” he names the reputational cost that gets omitted from domestic talking points: war isn’t only what happens “over there,” it’s what people believe you did, and those beliefs ricochet. The final clause sharpens that into a critique of strategic self-harm: the war is not merely failing to reduce terror; it is “provoking” it, manufacturing the very threat used to justify itself.

Context matters: this is a senior Democrat known for aggressive scrutiny of the Bush administration, speaking in an era when “support the troops” rhetoric often functioned as a muzzle on policy critique. Conyers sidesteps that trap by honoring American lives while insisting Iraqi lives and global blowback belong in the same equation.