Leadership Quote by Clare Short

“Obviously” is doing heavy lifting here: a rhetorical shove meant to make dissent sound naive. Clare Short, speaking as a politician steeped in the language of government responsibility, frames a grim thesis about normalization. The world isn’t merely witnessing isolated atrocities; it’s sliding into a lower moral baseline where civilians are increasingly treated as acceptable targets, whether by states or by non-state actors.

Her phrasing deliberately yokes together “state violence” (Iraq, Gaza) and “terrorist retaliation,” not to morally flatten them into identical acts, but to underline a feedback loop. The subtext is causal without quite saying “cause”: when powerful states adopt or tolerate civilian-harming tactics, they erode the taboo that once distinguished “legitimate” force from barbarism. That erosion becomes propaganda fuel and strategic justification for militants, who then claim their own attacks are responses rather than initiations. Short is warning about precedent as much as about body counts: standards collapse when they are selectively applied.

The context matters: Iraq invokes Western intervention and the credibility crisis around humanitarian rationales; Gaza invokes asymmetrical warfare and the recurring argument that security imperatives excuse civilian harm. By placing them side by side, Short signals impatience with partisan moral accounting. She’s less interested in litigating one conflict’s headlines than in diagnosing the long-term consequence: a world where outrage becomes episodic, legality becomes rhetorical, and “retaliation” becomes the predictable sequel to “shock and awe.”

It’s a politician’s bleak realism, aimed at puncturing the comforting idea that civilian protection is an upward-moving arc of history.