Daily Inspiration Quote by Condoleezza Rice

"Protect" does the heavy lifting here: a soft verb with a hard edge, designed to make power sound like public service. Rice’s line is built as a double shield - first "the region", then "Iraq's people and neighbors" - a cascade of beneficiaries that turns U.S. policy into a kind of humanitarian perimeter. It’s classic statesman rhetoric after 9/11: widen the circle of who’s supposedly being saved, and you widen the moral license for what comes next.

The specific intent is less to describe a strategy than to pre-frame it. By the time an audience gets to the facts - sanctions, no-fly zones, invasion planning, occupation - the argument has been emotionally escrowed in protection. "Simply" is the tell: it anticipates skepticism and tries to shrink the complexity of Iraq into a single, reassuring motive. If policy is "simply" protective, then dissent can be cast as naivete, or worse, indifference to suffering.

Subtext: the U.S. positions itself as the region’s necessary adult, authorized to decide what safety looks like for Iraqis and for countries that might be affected by Saddam Hussein’s regime. It also quietly fuses three different justifications - regional stability, Iraqi welfare, and neighbor security - so that if one rationale weakens, the others can carry the load. In the early 2000s, that redundancy mattered: weapons claims, democracy promotion, and humanitarian concern were competing sales pitches. Rice’s phrasing stitches them into one moral sentence, where American force becomes, rhetorically, an act of care.