Leadership Quote by John Linder

“Our soldiers have nobly fought” is doing more than praising troops; it’s laundering policy through sentiment. Linder’s line folds a messy national record into a single, unbroken story of virtue “since our country’s birth,” a phrase that turns history into heritage branding. The move is deliberate: if military action is framed as an origin myth rather than a series of political choices, then skepticism starts to look like heresy.

The key word is “freedom,” deployed as a catchall moral alibi. It’s elastic enough to cover defensive wars, disastrous interventions, and everything in between, while sounding nonpartisan and incontestable. Pair that with “those that could not protect themselves,” and you get a classic paternalistic script: America as adult-in-the-room, righteous by definition, empowered to decide who needs saving and how. That framing quietly sidelines the agency of people in “foreign lands” and, just as importantly, domestic dissent. If the mission is rescue, critics become obstructors of compassion.

Context matters: coming from a politician, this is less memorial than messaging. It’s the kind of sentence built for ceremonies, campaign stops, and votes on defense spending - language that wraps military service in civic sanctity and asks the audience to transfer that reverence to the decisions made by leaders. The subtext is transactional: honor the soldier, trust the state, stop asking awkward questions about costs, consequences, or contradictions.