Success Quote by Ron Lewis

The line leans on a classic post-9/11 political maneuver: fuse the everyday anxieties of domestic security with the grand moral language of global liberation, then bind both to a single policy bet. By making “safety at home” and “freedom abroad” “largely contingent” on “success in Iraq,” Ron Lewis doesn’t just argue for the war effort; he argues against the legitimacy of doubt. If Iraq is the hinge on which both protection and principle swing, then opposition isn’t merely disagreement, it’s recklessness.

The rhetorical trick is scale. “At home” evokes the intimate and immediate; “abroad” invokes America’s self-mythology as a freedom-exporting power. The phrase “cause of freedom” is deliberately soft-focus: it sounds noble while staying vague enough to absorb shifting justifications, from WMD fears to democratization. “Success,” too, is elastic. It can mean toppling a regime, holding elections, reducing violence, exiting with credibility. That ambiguity is functional, not accidental: it keeps the promise alive even as the goalposts move.

Contextually, this is the language of commitment in an era when the Iraq War’s rationale and outcomes were under pressure. The sentence is built to defend persistence, to treat withdrawal or critique as a threat multiplier. It’s not a prediction so much as a demand for political loyalty, draped in the rhetoric of national survival and moral mission.