War & Peace Quote by Peter DeFazio

“Nor should” is doing a lot of work here: it’s the language of refusal dressed up as prudence. DeFazio isn’t merely arguing strategy; he’s drawing a moral boundary around the U.S. role in Iraq, insisting that American force should not be conscripted into someone else’s internal contest for power. The phrase “forced to remain” flips the usual wartime posture of agency and control. It suggests inertia, bureaucratic momentum, and political cowardice back home - as if the military is trapped by decisions made for optics rather than outcomes.

The killer clause is “essentially as an army for one side of a civil war.” “Essentially” functions like a legal hedge and a rhetorical accelerator at once: it anticipates pushback (“We’re neutral,” “We’re stabilizing”) while insisting that on-the-ground realities don’t care about talking points. Once the conflict is framed as civil war, continued presence stops reading as liberation or counterterrorism and starts looking like partisan enforcement. That’s the subtext: even if the mission is branded as nation-building, it can operate as sectarian muscle.

In context, this is post-invasion disillusionment distilled into one sentence. It appeals simultaneously to anti-war Democrats, deficit hawks tired of open-ended commitments, and military families who hear “remain” as “indefinitely.” DeFazio’s intent is to reclassify the occupation from strategic necessity to political misuse: not just expensive and deadly, but fundamentally miscast - a superpower reduced to refereeing (or worse, picking teams) in a conflict it cannot resolve.