Politics & Power Quote by Virginia Foxx

"Brave soldiers and support personnel" is the rhetorical down payment: start with reverence, and you can ask the audience to accept almost anything that follows. Foxx’s line is engineered to fuse two registers that Americans are trained to treat as sacred: the troops and the Founding. By declaring Iraq "a battle as important as any" the U.S. has ever fought, she’s not just praising service; she’s inflating the stakes to historical maximum, placing a contemporary war in the same moral display case as World War II or the Civil War. That move doesn’t invite debate so much as it dares dissent to feel unpatriotic.

The key phrase is "crucial test of the ideals this Nation was founded upon". It reframes an elective foreign policy project as an identity referendum. Democracy in Iraq becomes less about Iraqi political realities and more about America proving itself to itself. That’s the subtext: if Iraq’s democracy fails, the insinuation goes, it’s not merely a strategic setback; it’s an ideological humiliation, evidence of national hypocrisy.

Context matters because this kind of language thrives when public support is wavering. It redirects attention from messy particulars - casualties, timelines, sectarian conflict, shifting rationales - toward an abstract, untouchable goal. The "success of democracy" is conveniently hard to measure and easy to postpone, which makes it a useful political shield. Foxx isn’t offering a policy argument; she’s offering a moral frame: the war as a loyalty test, the Founding as a warrant, and the troops as the human seal that discourages scrutiny.