Time & Perspective Quote by Zalmay Khalilzad

Khalilzad’s line is doing what wartime diplomacy so often does: turning a messy, contingent conflict into a clean moral lever. By calling “success in Iraq” a “major setback for terrorists,” he frames the U.S.-led project not as an occupation with competing local interests, but as a global security operation with a measurable outcome. The phrase “major asset” is technocratic on purpose; it sanitizes violence into a portfolio gain, security as something you can bank and compound.

The real move, though, is the second sentence. “The struggle for Iraq is the struggle for the future of the world” is scale inflation as persuasion. It takes a specific battlefield - with sectarian politics, regional rivalries, and post-invasion state collapse - and recasts it as a hinge-point of history. That’s not just rhetoric; it’s insulation. If Iraq becomes “the future of the world,” then setbacks can be framed as temporary turbulence in a civilization-sized project, and criticism can be cast as short-sightedness.

Context matters: Khalilzad was a key U.S. envoy during the mid-2000s, when the Iraq war’s legitimacy and trajectory were under intense pressure. This kind of language shores up coalition resolve and signals to regional actors that alignment with the new order is not optional. Subtext: Iraq is a test case. Win here, and you establish a model and deterrent; lose, and you embolden insurgents and rival states. The quote works because it offers policymakers and publics a simple story that feels strategically coherent, even when the reality on the ground refused to be.