Politics & Power Quote by Robert Fisk

Fisk’s scare quotes do the real work here, turning diplomatic language into a crime-scene annotation. “Friends,” “liberated,” even “new relationship with the world” are presented as marketing copy stapled onto a military campaign. The line isn’t just skeptical; it’s accusatory, implying that the performance of liberation is designed to launder power into legitimacy, and violence into partnership.

The context is the post-9/11 era, when the Bush administration sold intervention - especially in the Middle East - as a moral project with democratic dividends. Fisk, reporting for decades from the region, had seen how quickly “liberation” becomes a patronage system: handpicked allies, compliant strongmen, exiles flown in with talking points, reconstruction contracts routed to favored corporations. “Come here” reads like a victory lap, the presidential visit as a photo-op meant to certify a new order. It’s stagecraft: cameras, flags, handshakes, and the careful editing out of bodies and ruin.

“New economic fortunes” is the tell. Fisk suggests the war’s beneficiaries are not primarily the newly “freed” but the liberators and their networks - governments, contractors, and local intermediaries who can cash in on regime change. The subtext is colonial familiarity: the language of uplift masking extraction. Fisk’s intent is to puncture the sentimental storyline before it hardens into history, insisting we follow the money and the choreography, not the slogans.