Justice & Law Quote by Otto Schily

Schily’s line is less a warning than a piece of bureaucratic realism designed to harden a public mood. The key move is the calm pivot from uncertainty to certainty: “Nevertheless, I do know...” He concedes the fog, then claims the one thing that matters politically - a clear, actionable threat. “Danger zone” is deliberately vague, a phrase that borrows the aura of the battlefield without needing evidence you can fact-check on the evening news.

The context is early-2000s Europe, when Afghanistan and Iraq weren’t distant headlines but live wires in domestic politics: troop deployments abroad, heightened terror alerts at home, and a public negotiating how much security it was willing to buy at the price of privacy. By linking Germany’s role in Afghanistan with training Iraqi police, Schily sketches a causal chain that’s emotionally persuasive even when strategically contested: participation equals exposure. It’s an argument for entanglement-as-risk, useful for justifying tougher internal security measures while framing them as reluctant necessities rather than ideological choices.

The subtext is about responsibility and consequence. Schily avoids moral language - no talk of freedom, civilization, or evil - because he’s speaking as a public servant, not a crusader. That restraint is itself rhetorical. It asks citizens to accept expanded vigilance (and likely expanded state powers) as the grown-up response to a grown-up problem. “The terrorists also have us in their sights” turns foreign policy into a domestic ledger: we acted abroad; we must now pay for protection at home.