Leadership Quote by Christine Gregoire

Patriotism is doing a lot of quiet work here, not as chest-thumping ideology but as political solvent. Gregoire’s line isn’t really about Iraq or disaster relief; it’s about an American audience she wants to stitch together with a premise that’s hard to publicly reject: respect for the troops. “Surely” functions like a soft gavel. It pre-loads agreement, implying that dissent would be not just wrong but socially suspect.

The phrase “no issue unites us more” is telling because it frames military appreciation as the last safe common ground in an era of partisan fracture. That’s the intent: relocate debate away from the contested decisions of leaders and toward the unimpeachable sacrifice of service members. It’s a classic maneuver in democratic politics, especially during the post-9/11 years and the Iraq War, when public support for the mission wobbled but support for troops remained culturally mandatory.

Look at the triptych of verbs: “bringing aid,” “defending us,” “fighting to make a free election possible.” The military becomes simultaneously humanitarian, protector, and midwife of democracy. This is not accidental; it compresses multiple narratives into one moral arc, smoothing over uncomfortable facts about war’s messiness, civilian casualties, and the politics of intervention. “Devastated countries” stays vague, sidestepping which devastations the U.S. may have helped cause. “Terrorism” is broad enough to be everywhere and nowhere, an elastic threat that justifies permanence.

The subtext: you can argue about policy later, but first you must signal reverence. In that sense, the sentence is a loyalty test disguised as unity.